Sylvia Acevedo needed a break from her technology job so she
bought an old Victorian house to remodel into a bed and
breakfast. "Being an engineer working in technology, I
really felt I didn't do a lot of tangible work. But with the
bed and breakfast, at the end of the day, I felt like I had
actually done something."
And, of course, she had—because as she renovated the house,
she transformed it into a beautiful B&B. She had no problem communicating with the construction crew, who were mostly
Hispanic, because she grew up speaking both Spanish and
English. "My mother was from Mexico and all
of my grandparents lived there," she says.
"People would see me talking to a crew of workers and I
literally would have contractors stop and hand me the phone,
asking me to translate for them," she says. That's how she
realized communication between Hispanic construction workers
and non-Spanish-speaking supervisors was really a problem.
Being a software engineer, Sylvia's mind immediately went to
solving the problem. "I think it's because I've always been
an innovator and I see things maybe in a way that provides a
side-door solution. I don't just look at the situation and
say, 'Okay, it's a bottleneck'. I try to look at new ways to
solve the problem. And in this particular situation, the
problem was communication." But she didn't follow through on her ideas for a few more years.
After two years of renovating and running the B&B, Sylvia
was ready to get back into the technology field, so she
hired a manager for the bed and breakfast, and started a
software development company with three others. A few years later, Sylvia and her partners later sold the software company.
"That was really interesting," she says, "because we sold it
for stock and then the stock market crashed. But that was an
important learning lesson because I learned a lot about
creating a company that supported intellectual property and
taking it from literally concept to actually building a
company."
By this time she had also sold the B&B for a tidy little sum
and was ready to solve the communication problem she
saw a few years before. She realized there were a lot
of non-Spanish-speaking people in the United States who were
hiring people who only spoke Spanish for service jobs. "And
you have a challenge because how do you direct the work
that needs to be done?" she says.
The solution? The CommuniCard, easy-to-use Spanish/English
communication cards. There's a deck of housekeeping cards
with pictures of the tasks and English/Spanish translations,
and several accordion-folded, laminated pocket cards for the
construction industry showing tools, tasks and translations,
and a similar pocket card for the lawncare industry. This
allows the supervisor to merely show the card to the worker
to communicate. For instance, one of the cards shows a
person cleaning a big window with a spray bottle in one hand
while using a squeegee in the other. The wording below the
illustration says, "Clean the windows. Limpia las
ventanas." So if the worker cannot speak English, or even
read, it is clear what is being asked.
Before putting it into production she tested it extensively,
first in Texas, and then across the United States. "I went
to Northern California, Southern California, New Mexico,
Colorado and across the South and Texas. I found the
biggest needs were in construction and housekeeping," she
says. She began by interviewing the people who hired these
workers—everyone from Junior Leaguers, to people in
office settings who hired workers, to companies and
construction firms. She also began to go to day-labor sites
and construction sites to interview the workers. But the
supervisors weren't appreciative of her being on jobsites,
even if she only spoke to workers while they were on their
breaks.
"So I would approach them at bus stops, churches, and
schools." And what she learned was very informative. "We
began to get a lot of feedback and the product changed dramatically as a result," she says.
All in all, she spoke to over 4,000 people. After the
informal research, it was time for something a little more
elaborate. "We've done many focus groups, and we do them on
all the products," Sylvia says. The interviews are conducted
by a professional, trained moderator who's bilingual.
"And
that's a very important issue," she says. "When you have a
vision for a product, you really need to get customer input.
But there's also a fine line between getting too much input
and not enough. I didn't want to go into analysis paralysis
or information overload."
One of the important outcomes of the focus groups was that
one person in the first focus group had such a huge
need to solve the communication problem that he approached
her about investing in the company. She accepted, and for a
stake in the company, he paid for the initial production of
the cards.
The company is now in the middle of its second year and
sales are increasing. So far, they've sold thousands of the
cards, but it's slow going. Sylvia originally thought the
product would be sold through retail stores, but she found
that her previous distribution experience was no longer
valid.
"My experience was dated. It was years before Wal-Mart had taken over and many of the people that I went to
call on in the industry were no longer there. In fact, the
businesses were gone."
Finding a roadblock in the path to retail distribution was a
big disappointment, but the company simply adjusted its
thinking and found another way. Now, instead of selling
through national retail chains as she had hoped, CommuniCard
products are sold through trade associations and the
company's website , as well
as through a few local retail stores.
To promote the innovative product, Sylvia doesn't use traditional advertising. She has found that
public relations works best because it's such a new product
that requires too much education and explaining.
It's a low-price-point item, with the housekeeping
cards selling for $15.95 and all the others selling for less
than $10, so Sylvia has found that tradeshows are not
particularly effective, either. "You're competing with so
many giveaways at tradeshows that I found it really
diminished the value of our brand. People would say, 'Gosh,
they just gave me this really cool saw that's worth 30 bucks
and you're not going to give me this for $10?' So I found it
to be very expensive and unproductive," she says.
Nevertheless, in its first year of business CommuniCard sold well
over 5,000 units of the housekeeping cards, and somewhat
less of the others, generating just under a $100,000 in
sales.
The company has branched out into consulting as well
as product sales because there's a need for the expertise
Sylvia has acquired through all her research. "Most marketing
firms focus on selling consumer products to Hispanics," she
says. Instead, she focuses on solving problems. For instance,
the bus company hired her to find out why so few Hispanics
ride the bus.
Sylvia was also recognized in 2004 as the National
Businesswoman of the Year by the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of
Commerce.
CommuniCard recently introduced a new set of cards for law
enforcement, and police departments have had great interest in them. Sylvia
offers to customize the cards with the police department's
badge, and this requires an order of hundreds, which customers are readily doing.
The company has also been researching other languages to see
what new products might be developed, but so far they
haven't found the right match. "When we tested the
(original) cards in Chicago, people wanted cleaning cards in
Polish. But that's such a small market. We'd only be able to
sell those in New York, Chicago and maybe Boston. Whereas
the housekeeping cards in Spanish/English are selling across
the country," she says.
One of the things that Sylvia made sure to do was protect
her idea. She has a patent pending and, of course,
everything is copyrighted and trademarked. As a result of
her software engineering background, she knew how important
this was. She says she often urges other women inventors to
protect their assets, and she has helped several either
copyright or trademark their ideas.
One of the things that has surprised her is people need
these products so urgently they are willing to pay
FedEx delivery charges to get them overnight. "I bet we get
no less than three orders per week where people want the
product so fast that they're willing to pay more in
shipping than the product costs," she says, which leads her
to wonder if the product is correctly priced. "We're
constantly evaluating," she says.
