They say that "everybody's a critic," and that never seems more true than when you're
pursuing a dream and trying to enlist support. There will always be well-meaning
people who want to "protect" you from your "unrealistic fantasies." Critics tried
to discourage Maria Elena Ibanez from starting a computer business. And yet she
ignored their negative input and pursued her goal anyway.
When Maria Elena Ibanez was a teenager in Colombia, her father enrolled her in a
course on programming minicomputers. Computers were becoming more common in Latin
America, despite their $100,000 price tag, and Maria Elena was instantly taken with
this revolutionary technology. In 1973, she went to the United States to study computer
science at college and after graduation, she had an idea.
Personal computers were selling in the United States for $8,000--a fraction of what
Latin American businesses were paying for their minicomputers.
Why not set up distribution
of personal computers south of the border she thought,
where a fertile market
was just waiting to be tapped? She took her idea to the major computer
companies in 1980 and asked for a chance to distribute their products in her home
country.
They told Maria Elena to forget it!. The computer executives said Latin America
was in the midst of an economic crisis and Latin America countries were too poor
and didn't have the money to make it a market for them to pursue.
Maria Elena saw the situation differently. She saw opportunity where others saw
limitations. She figured, even if the market was only $10 million, it was still
big enough for her and that she could make money in it. Plus, there was no competition.
Maria Elena quickly realized that she had three strikes against her. She was twenty-three
years old, a woman, and had no sales or marketing experience. But she knew two things:
computers were cheap in the United States, and Latin America needed them. Hopeful
and optimistic, she approached a banker and requested a line of credit. He wanted
to see her business plan. Maria Elena had never heard of such a thing. The second
banker she approached asked for her marketing plan. She didn't know what that was,
either. Then she tried to go directly to the distributors. Most wouldn't meet with
her, but two listened skeptically. She asked, "How much business are
you
currently doing in Latin America?" They said "None." Maria Elena committed to selling
$10,000 of their product a year in Latin America and that all of her orders would
be prepaid. Altos Computers--with nothing to lose--gave her an exclusive distribution
agreement for nine months.
Maria Elena's next step was to call a travel agent. Her instructions were simple:
"Book me on a flight from Miami to Argentina, stopping in every major city I can
without having to pay extra." That was how Maria Elena designed her marketing plan.
She later told me that "Ignorance can be bliss and sometimes it pays off because
she didn't know what she was getting herself into."
With no experience, belief in her goal and common sense became her guides. She landed
in Colombia, checked into a hotel, opened the Yellow Pages, and began calling computer
dealers. She figured, the bigger the ad, the bigger the company. So she chose the
companies that had the biggest ads first.