When Junea Rocha was designing a founder resource program, she drew on her own experience starting and then growing frozen food brand Brazi Bites over the last 12 years.
The program's capital offering would be a grant, make that, a true grant with no strings attached, no direction for deployment and no equity taken.
Its mentorship would be tailored to the founder and would tap into the expertise of the 20-member team at her fast-growing brand.
And it would target Latino founders with consumer packaged goods businesses with less than $1 million in revenue. That’s a point in a new business when capital is particularly hard to get and mentorship is critical.
The result is the Latino Entrepreneur Accelerator Program. It will award one winner a $10,000 business grant and 12 weeks of mentorship with Rocha, the rest of the Brazi Bites team and their network. Three other finalists will get a marketing boost from Brazi Bites with features on the website and other promotions including through the brand's several-hundred-thousand email list.
“The thought was, where can we add the most value?” Rocha said of her strategy for planning the program. “In my experience until you hit that ($1 million) level of revenue it is really hard to get funding and support and attention.”
For Rocha, it took the brand five years to hit $1 million in revenue. She and her co-founder husband Cameron MacMullin pieced together funding. They cashed out their retirements, sold a car and got a little money from family. They were also able to get small loans, including one from Whole Foods and one backed by the Small Business Administration through Albina Community Bank.
The loans were possible because the two were fortunate enough to own a home they put up for collateral.
“We got our lives as lean as possible to the bare minimum plus our house,” she recalls.
The loans were also tied to manufacturing equipment so they couldn’t be used in other areas of the business.
“It’s hard to get money and it’s harder to get money to deploy at your discretion,” she said, adding that all the time to get capital was time not spent working to get the products on store shelves.
Rocha views the first year of the accelerator as a pilot to gauge how the program goes. The team will assess whether it fills a need and adds value to entrepreneurs. It will thenl look at repeating it and scaling the program. The accelerator was Rocha’s idea and the capital is coming from Brazi Bites, but company’s private equity investor is fully on board with the program, Rocha said.
Brazi Bites makes gluten-free, Latin-inspired frozen foods. Its flagship product is frozen Brazilian Cheese Bread, based on a recipe Rocha developed using ingredients she could find in the U.S. that could sate her longing for a snack from her native Brazil.
Its products are available in 16,000 stores nationwide.
