The Shoe Sales Man

The Shoe Salesman

The tale I am about to tell you, is a true story of a man with a vision, an entrepreneurial dream of fortune, glory, and the yearning to succeed. It is the chronicle of a man, who exhausted himself in search of employment, just to hear from everyone: “You are over qualified”. Refusing to accept failure and taking a hint from employers that would not hire him, he was force to wake up and smell the coffee; employers in this tiny island were not looking for leaders they were looking for mules.
I first met Ernesto Herrera while studying towards my master degree in Technology Management at the University of Phoenix in Guaynabo, Puerto Rico. As I recall, Ernesto was working towards his master in Global Management and we were both allocate in the same finance course group which was a requirement for everybody doing a master in business administration. At the University of Phoenix, students are required to study in groups to develop team work and leadership skills. At the end of each class, all groups have to present a power point presentation of a business investigation according to the professor and class requirements. While in our finance class, Ernesto worked hard at understanding the bits and pieces of material because to him and too many of us in the same class, finance was not our strong subject, every time the professor explained something for us, he was speaking a different language from a far away country, it was like trying to decipher ancient scripts; for us the non finance guru the class was a test that took all our efforts to pass. After we finished the finance class we both went our separate directions to our respective concentration programs and we never had another course together.
While conducting investigations for my courses I would see Ernesto almost every day at the student resource center surfing the internet for who knows what, sometimes I would pass by him and say “Hi”, other times I would pass by and establish a conversation with him. During our conversations at the student resource center I discovered that Ernesto was involved in learning a martial art from the Philippines that required swords, knifes and sticks, also he was planning a trip to the Philippines to get accredited in that martial art before concluding his master. Ernesto told me that he was raise by a Philippine family and that he was much in loved with the Philippine culture. Now I have to make a comment: up to this point Ernesto was a mystery to me, he had so many different little stories to tell and it was fun listening to most of his tales, he was a walking question mark full of life and wisdom. Ernesto a Latino guy born of Porto Rican parents, who could not speak Spanish and was raise by Philippines, told me that he became an orphan at a very young age and turned into and urchin before he met his Philippine family. When he became part of that family, his life changed for the better and that same guy who was raise by an oriental family, years latter decided to change his life again an took to Puerto Rico. Trying his luck in a place were he did not know anybody and did not speak the language (Spanish) very well, Ernesto a man in his middle forties studying towards his master was struggling to get by on this hostile environment.
It was during our final day as a student of the University of Phoenix that my class mates and I went to a restaurant bar to celebrate our last day of class; while at this bar I met Ernesto who was back from his trip to the Philippines. He told me of his journey to the Philippines to get a certification in some martial art and how, while working on that certification he met some people who talked to him about shoes and after that moment an idea was born, an idea born of that desire to win. He brought back that entrepreneur spirit that people need to start their own business, and from then on, Mr. Herrera worked hard on putting his idea to paper. He wanted to be the sole distributor of high class Philippines made shoes in Puerto Rico; Ernesto the shoe salesman was committed to his project and started moving heaven and earth to find out information that would support his venture. He established a company named H. Herrera a long with his teammates from his master degree in global management. Mr. Herrera went on a second trip to the Philippines in which he brought ten pair of shoes accompanied of a small catalog of top quality shoes to show people. After this second trip Ernesto was committed to succeed and started working on the business plan to present to different banks for a new business loan. Ernesto was getting good information and making great progress but still he had to many obstacles to deal with, one of then been the need of a car to move around San Juan, so I decided to give him a little help with his investigation and transportation, and at the same time I was learning how to open my own business. We visited many government offices looking for information and finding out about permits and licenses needed for the transportation of Ernesto’s products to establish a supply chain from the Philippines to Puerto Rico. The only thing I was getting from all this was knowledge on how to open a business and a good story, so I decided to keep helping him as much as I could with out hurting my self because I was also going through the same stuff of being over qualified for most positions and not having the necessary qualifications for others. We visited many places and talked to a lot of people Mr. Herrera and I; we discovered the hard way how bad the government offices are run, nobody knew which offices Ernesto and I needed to go to ask for a ship broker’s license and we walked the long road towards government bureaucratic. It was a slow and tiresome process to find information about the ship broker’s license but Ernesto in his earnest to start his own business never gave up and kept going against all obstacles that came his way.
It is necessary to mention that Ernesto believed in his idea as a message from a higher power, he was not a religious person but he was a very spiritual man. He presented his ideas with such passion that people would stand there listening to him for long periods of time. As we visited more government offices to find out information, I never pictured myself as becoming part of his work group, or company. We were just two people walking to places and learning new things, it was a simple economic barter were he was in a position to do things faster as I provided him with transportation and I was getting to write what we were doing. The entire process to us was like a class room with no walls and no teachers to guide us; as we stumbled together in the road to his success I kept writing his story. We traveled to places, we waited at long lines, we participated in seminars and we exchanged ideas for the benefit of his project; it was like putting together a puzzle of a thousand pieces. The more we learned the more doubts and questions arise but Ernesto would not leave anything to chance and he was planning for any eventuality, he was covering all the bases of this game.
Mr. Herrera was a man with an idea; he knew that the shoe market in the Philippines has not been touched by any small shoe distributor in the island and that it was a decreasing industry in the Philippines ever since China joined the shoe production market. Ernesto mentioned that the industry once a healthy 70,000 strong producers came down to a 20,000 and decreasing shoe makers; their factories and their industry were sinking fast but the government was trying to save the dying industry. Two other things that were fuelling Ernesto were: first the pour coin exchange that benefited him as a buyer of a 52 Philippines pesos to one US dollar which was much lower than other shoe producing countries like Brazil, Italy, or China. The second opportunity that fuelled Ernesto was the undeveloped economic route of exchange between the Philippines and Puerto Rico which represented an unexploited new market. What is more, Ernesto pictured himself as doing the Philippines a favor by helping their decreasing industry and developing new markets, in a way he was fulfilling a moral obligation as a global citizen an entrepreneur to a culture that has done so much for him.