Hector Saldivar remembers when strangers would knock on his mother’s door in Mexico.
They were not looking to borrow a cup of sugar, as the old saying goes, but rather a cup of hot sauce.
“My mother, was already quite famous at home with the hot sauce she made,” Saldivar said. “This family recipe hot sauce”.
Others on her doorstep asked for that recipe, or the opportunity to go to business with her. Very defender of the family’s recipe, she refused to share it until the right business partner came by knocking: her son.
“My mother was extremely happy that she could finally be able to pass the recipe,” Saldivar Ashley Chaparro told Bísness School – a Podcast NBC highlighting the stories of Latin entrepreneurs’ success.
Saldivar turned the recipe of hot sauce to the TIA Lupita Foods brand, a Mexico -inspired line of healthy foods that also includes chips and tortillas. He took the products from his mother’s threshold to local stores, and then to the national retailer and “Tank Shark”.
“Really really difficult to understand and understand the size of the business of this business and receiving the business of a thousand shops,” Saldivar said. “Little by little, children’s steps … and then steps normal, and then you can start to sidewalk and then run.”
However, running a business was new to him.
In Mexico, he worked for a car battery manufacturer, the high ingredient for which is sulfuric acid. He continued to study abroad, taking care packages from his mother who would include her hot sauce, which she would share with college friends.
He later joined what at the time was a developing food brand founded in Mexico City called my class. There he sold frescoes, a mixture for powdered drinks he compared to Kool-Aid but to Mexican aromas.
“This was my initiation for food and drink,” he said. “It was an entry level role. I was on sale. I was literally a door -to -door salesman.”
Saldivar was now the one knocking on the doors of strangers.
He advanced to larger companies, joining Nestle and then Diamond Foods, who in 2015 was purchased by Snyder-Monice. To stay with the company, it will need to be transferred from the Gulf area to North Carolina.
“That was that fork on the street,” he said.
His options, he said, were either transferred to the east coast and staying with a large company or staying in the Gulf area and looking for a new job. Or …
“Start this venture,” he said. “This thing people had been a kind of like drinking me, leading me, leading to me,” You have to start your brand of hot sauce. “… I chose the less traveled road.”
This road included the start of a self-financed operation in 2019 that eventually put its hot sauce in local stores. He was quickly discovered by a distributor, his products are still reaching on Walmart shelves, Whole Foods, Wegman’s and other retailers.
The request exceeded the operation, which means it was time to share his mother’s recipe with a manufacturer to scale the business.
“From doing yourself to go to a manufacturer, then you have to donate this recipe for which you are really a kind of how to delegate and believe,” he said. “You have to be very careful.”
Especially when swimming with sharks.
Saldivar appeared in the ABC business reality series “Shark Tank” in the hope of securing an agreement with one of its investors. At the beginning of his sales field, a shark did not seem so interested in taking a bite.
“The first thing I said is,” Raise your hand if you like to eat Tacos, “” Saldivar said for his field on the show. “Happens what happens? Daymond John says, ‘I hate Tacos’. … You can listen to the record by scratching in my head. Errrrrrrr. Like, what? Which Taco truck ran over your puppy that made you hate tacos? “
Kevin O’Leary – Shark with the nickname “Mr. Wonderful” – Tacos liked and the company. Saldivar secured an agreement with O’Leary for $ 500,000 and gained national exposure from the millions that looked at the episode.
“I remember, seeing online sales that happen live while the episode broadcast on my Shopify and it was something extraordinary, like we had 50,000 visitors,” he said.
The word of the mouth, Saldivar said, is the most effective way to grow a business. Whether this is knocking on the door of a stranger, appearing on a TV show, or buying his product in the grocery store and giving it the client in line after it – all he has done.
“It’s all part of the rush,” he said. “All is part of trying to get your brand and your products in people’s hands.”