Episode 2: Business in Colombia, A closer look
I don’t think anyone decides to leave a decent job or career and become an entrepreneur with the expectations that it will be easy. Most people are not that naive (or dare I say, ARROGANT, haha) to think they are just going to walk into a situation where they are immediately successful. I mentioned in Episode 2 of “Road to Tiny Village Cartagena, “Business in Colombia” that I knew there would a plethora of challenges in starting the project. Knowing the challenges with being an entrepreneur I told myself “this is going to be one of the most difficult things you do in your life.” I analyzed the things that I thought could be difficult more me: being a new entrepreneur. Starting a company in a totally unfamiliar industry. Building a business in foreign country. Capital. Organization. etc, etc, etc. All of these variables are challenges, and they were expected. But, BY FAR, the thing I underestimated the most when it came to create Tiny Village Cartagena were the specific challenges, and complexity of doing business in Colombia.
Language — it’s not Spanish, its COSTEÑOL
My first week in Cartagena, I decided to go to check out a beach club a few days as I recovered from the New Years Eve festivities. I remember laying on one of the beach beds when a guy approached me looking confused (because, like who hangs out in a beach club by themselves). He asked me where I was from. I told him New York, and he proceeded to ask me what I was doing in Cartagena…..
“You moved here!?” he asked in amazement. He then asked me if I knew Spanish, and I told him “not really.” And thats when his eyebrows really raised.
“And you’re going to learn here!?”
I shrugged and told him “yea” (I didn’t really see the big deal). Then I got a bit of foreshadowing of of what the next few years of my life of “learning spanish” would be. He says “you’re going to learn Spanish IN CARTAGENA?!? I’m from Medellin, and I don’t even understand people when they talk here.” I was a bit confused, but later on I would learn what he meant. The people of Cartagena are famous for the way that they talk. They call it “golpeado” which means “hit.” They not only talk at a much faster pace than the rest of the country, but they also “eat” the ends of their words (in Cartagena, someone will say “va’mo” for “vamos” or “pa’ve” for “para ver”). Add this with the uniquely Cartagenean slang and its almost impossible newly minted gringo’s to understand local “COSTEÑOL” language (language of the coastal people).
My first couple years were ROUGH, not only because I was never really a “language” person, but because the best learning you can get is practicing, and was pretty timid at first to practice. Many times the “COSTEÑOL” responses I got back to questions were really hard to understand which would lead to some embarrassment. Luckily, most of my good friends in Colombia were from Cartagena and speak COSTEÑOL natively so they would teach me words, jokes, and slang while were together. They seemed to love to teach me phrases and hear me say it with my “gringo” accent and loved it even more when I said it correctly with just the right emphasis to make it sound really “Colombian.” This would help prepare myself to have the confidence to talk more with strangers, which eventually helped me improve. But man, that was a journey!
The laws (or lack thereof).
Colombia is a unique place for plenty of reasons. Many come here for the beauty, the people, culture, the food — you name it. But when visiting any place for vacation (not just Colombia), things like the laws, permit processes, and general legal norms are the furthest things from your mind. Once I started working on the Tiny Village Cartagena project, setting up the business and looking for properties, I realized how important these items actually are. I started to realize that some of the structure that we are used to and depend on to facilitate safe and secure business growth in the USA just doesn’t exist here. There are a lot of things that you have to just “figure out” yourself. Our legal structure and procedures allows for a clear cut path to obtaining things like permits, registration and licenses necessary to operate a successful business. This was one of the first signifiant, and unexpected “Colombian” challenges when it came to creating the Tiny Village Project. Getting a bank account, an ID, permits, legalizing the Tiny Village property, are tasks that took months and hundreds of trips to local offices — which equated to hours and hours of (EXTRA) work.
The way folks typically get around this “red tape” in Colombia is to just not do those “official” things like register their business. They figure if they get “in trouble” with any authorities (who are officials that typically are just looking for payouts anyway), they’ll just figure out a way to pay their way out (which is also typical here). The other route is to find someone in some of these “official” offices that they can pay under to table to push their applications/documentation through. Either way, this is a legal system that breeds corruption, something that we have steered clear from at Tiny Village Cartagena. It has been extremely hard, and costed us a lot of time, but worth the peace of mind, and clean conscious.
The business culture.
As I’ve mentioned in some of my previous posts, I spent most of my professional career (and almost all of my 20s) working in big tech. One of the things that always stuck with me from my time at Apple was talking to a teammate after he was about a year into the job about his experience so far at Apple. One of the things he mentioned to me about working at the company was that he was astonished (and refreshed) that almost everyone he worked with at Apple was “REALLY ON THEIR SHIT.” I was still pretty early in my career, and I remember thinking that was so weird. I remember asking him, “wait, thats like A THING at other companies, that people aren’t good or don’t care about what they do?” He looked at me kind of like “poor kid, he doesn’t know anything about the REAL world” (haha) and said, “HELL YES thats a thing.” That was the first time that I realized that maybe the environment I was in of “everyone being on their shit” wasn’t normal in “the real world” outside of the Apple bubble I lived in. When I moved to Colombia, I got a huge dose of that. The business culture was actually extremely jarring for me. Efficiency, punctuality, responsibility, ownership of issues were generally not things that were valued. So for me, finding good people, contractors, providers, etc. that valued those things has been a really tough tasks, and I’ve had a really hard time adjusting. Coming from a super efficient, and rigid environment where pretty much everyone cared about THEIR work and strived to be the best at it, it was really difficult for me to adapt the the “Colombian way” of doing business. Agendas in meetings? Forget about it. Starting meetings on time? Would be a miracle. Meeting delivery deadlines — good luck! I’m still adjusting … ::sigh:: 😔
The Infrastructure
Mannn…. Infrastructure was probably the last thing that was on my mind when it came to the Tiny Village Cartagena project. But boooyyyy is this a big one. Tiny Village Cartagena is on an island 10 minutes from the city center of Cartagena— the most visited tourist city in Colombia. Most of the island’s residents don’t have an official energy service provider and none of the island has running water, nor gas lines. At Tiny Village, we decided to built a really amazing sustainable project from the start because we felt strongly about having as little impact on the environment as possible. But, to be honest, we are lucky we did things like outfitting the site with solar power, creating a rain water harvesting system, and water treatment and reutilization. They have turned out to be a essential because of the lack of infrastructure on the island. Our plans to build our project with solar energy in mind went from a “idealistic” to an actual necessity really quickly based on the conditions on the island and the lack of public services. It required more time, analysis and investment in order to make sure our energy situation was reliable, but was worth it!
Believe it or not, water on the island is another huge issue. Not only does the island not have running water, but there is no alternative government provided water solution. We are left at the whims of private water providers to bring water in boats from Cartagena.. These guys provide their service on a “deliver to order” basis — so you call, and they deliver. The problem is, they hardly ever show up when they say they will. We’ve had situations where we are waiting for water for weeks (literally weeks), to the point where we had to ration the water with buckets. It’s crazy, and hard to believe the fact that I will be running a hotel, and I don’t have a reliable water provider — in 2022! Some of this stress prompted us to take our sustainable efforts further and create a rainwater collection system that allows us to store rainwater, filter out dirt and sediment, and use it. Every problem has a solution.
Friends
I’ve always had a lot of “friends” — or at least people who I had the mutual feeling of “enjoyment” to be around. That has been a bit of a blessing, I know. But most of the friends I’ve had are mostly compartmentalized. I have basketball friends, tech friends, party friends, vacation friends, chill out friends, introspective conversations friends, and the list goes on and on.
We always say life and business is based on relationships. I think that can’t be more true than in Colombia. I always laugh with my Colombian friends about how every meeting we have here starts with the “Colombian 10 minutes” where you ask how the other person’s family is doing, and talk niceties before getting down to business. You might talk about the soccer game or even make coffee before you start meetings. To Americans, we look at the beginning of a meeting as not the time for those conversations. It’s like “if we get what we need to get done in the allotted time, then we can talk about “fun stuff.” In Colombia it’s rude to start meetings without checking in on someone at length (and for an American, to exhaustion). Relationships in business seem to be much deeper and stronger and I see a lot more family businesses in Colombia in where the whole family is integrated in every aspect of the business.
Luckily when I moved to Colombia, I quickly made some amazing friends. I think because of the general Colombian culture (and maybe because I didn’t have many friends and latched on to them haha), these friends became a lot less “compartmentalized” than my American friendships. These friends helped me with EVERYTHING when it came to living here and building Tiny Village Cartagena. From getting my VISA situated, to getting my Colombian ID, to negotiating contracts. They became not only my friends, but integral pieces of my growth here as well as Tiny VIllage’s growth. If it wasn’t for meeting these people taking time out of their schedules to help me — many times offering to help when I was maybe too embarrassed to ask myself — Tiny Village wouldn’t of gotten off of the ground. As I looked at every major step in the Tiny Village process, I saw that a “friend” lending their time to help me was a catalyst to the advancement of Tiny Village at that point. It’s actually quite beautiful to think about how many of these friends have had an impact on the project. For that, I am super thankful, not only to those friends, but to the Colombian culture that raised them.
Building this business in Colombia has been a bit of a roller coaster ride of surprises, frustrations, ups and downs, disappointments and triumphs. All of these experiences have stretched, challenged, and motivated me to rise to the occasion, even when I doubted myself. I feel super blessed to look by at this 5 year journey and be able to say that I have overcome most of the challenges that have presented themselves with the culture, infrastructure, language and laws in Colombia. Here is to eventually conquering business in Colombia 🥂.