I am the child I’m trying to reach. I grew up with a Latina,
Spanish dominant, immigrant and single mother who worked three jobs to make
ends meet. My mom use to say, “we may be poor, but we’re not stupid.” Education
was the way out of the “hood,” and she was going to ensure I and my siblings
would get there. Like many immigrant families with small children I was sent
away at 7 years old to the homeland (in this case Panamá) to spend the summers
with my grandmother. I didn’t speak a word of Spanish and I was terrified.
After three months of full immersion I came back fully bilingual and
bicultural. I begged my mom to send me back and she did when I was 9 and 14
years old. I intimately understand what it’s like to be thrusted into a foreign
environment where you don’t speak the language.
Ultimately, learning a second language and becoming
bicultural opened up many opportunities for me. These new skill sets set the
stage for my academic studies and long term career path. I would carry the flag
for those who didn’t have a voice to influence change. I would take my skills
and knowledge to Sony Music Entertainment and propose a completely out of the
box idea (originally met with great resistance). My strategy was to take some
of the Latino artists on the Latin label and cross them over to the general
market. A multi-million dollar strategy resulting in huge sales. Since then
I've been devising winning business strategies to help company's tap into the
ever-growing Hispanic market. I opened up an office on the West Coast and
provided similar services to the movie studios. One of my many film clients was
Mel Gibson and while controversial, I handled all the Hispanic marketing and PR
for “The Passion of the Christ;” now a casebook marketing study.
After 10 years in entertainment,
I went to work for a visionary man; Mario Baeza the former executive chairman
of Vme Media. Alongside a research analyst, we conducted extensive research
about the Latino educational crisis. With this research in hand, Mario wrote a
white paper about the crisis and how high quality children’s programming could
better prepare Latino children for kindergarten. That white paper essentially
became the foundation for my startup, Bilingual Children’s Enterprises. My
company is an
e-learning, multimedia edutainment company developing, aggregating and
acquiring bilingual and dual language transmedia properties. Our mission is to
provide our users/customer base with appropriate and effective tools to
stimulate children’s language and numeracy skills through bilingual and dual language
content from an early age. We intend to develop and position original and
acquired kid content across multiple platforms including broadcasting,
streaming video, web, mobile and tablets. We create products with high
pedagogic quality accompanied with a large dose of fun for learning to take its
course without the child ever even noticing. Families and educators who are
interested in bilingual, dual language and preschool through 1st grade content,
are our primary target audience.
In 2011, a small network in the
NYC area was awarded a $30 million grant from the US Department of Education.
Out of 300 content providers, we were selected as a top three finalist. For
this grant submission I assembled an amazing team, invested $10,000 of my own
money to create our demo and of course countless hours. While we were waiting
for a decision from this network, I submitted our demo and business plan to
another network. Ultimately, we didn’t win the grant, but still it gave me the
confidence to know we we’re on the right track. We ended up hearing from the
second network and began negotiations to give them the distribution rights to
the show; all contingent upon us securing the funding for production. With a distribution contract in hand we
also secured investors. However, after a long process of figuring out the
production budget, our investors decided to pull the plug at the start line. It
took three years of hard work to get to this point and then surprisingly with a
three-sentence email, everything came to a halt. These two huge set backs completely derailed my enthusiasm
for my startup and caused my co-founder to leave. I took off almost a year from
working on my startup and then to my surprise, a friend wrote me check that
ultimately helped me start all over again. So here I am, yet again, persevering
through my failures and lessons learned with an even greater level of
enthusiasm. I don’t know where this entrepreneurial spirit comes from…sometimes
I think it’s a blessing, other times it feels like a curse.
Check us out at www.tipitomtales.com
