Episode 49: Karina Mora -Entrepreneurship
Hola! Y bienvenidas to a new season!
I’m Karina host of Elevating la Cultura podcast. I wrapped up Season 4 in May and after a two month break I’m excited to introduce Season 5!
Over the break, you all kept listening and catching up on past episodes bringing us to over 2300 downloads! Muchisimas gracias for continuing to listen and share with your community. If you haven’t listened to the first four seasons, you can binge listen to season one featuring Latinas entrepreneurs, season two highlighting Latinas in the health and wellness space, and season 3 with Latina educators, and season 4 focused on artists and creators.
Each season elevates different stories, but all with the Latina perspective. We all have passion in our areas of expertise, while also pouring into and empowering the next generation. Because honestly it starts with us being willing to put in the work to make generational change.
After doing a lot of healing work in my own life, I’m excited to introduce season 5 where I’ll share my story with my listeners. I’m diving deeper on different areas of my life that have contributed to me doing what I do for my family and why I created this community where we elevate our cultura.
So let’s get into it with Episode 1
A huge part of who I am is being an entrepreneur.
I remember when I was in middle school there was an assignment where you were supposed to present what your parents did for their work. My father worked, and my mother stayed home, so I asked her what papi’s job was. Now I knew that he went to work everyday really early in the morning, and he wouldn’t come home until we were ready to go to bed. But beyond that I didn’t know what he actually did. My mother said he own’s businesses. And I guess I knew that a little bit because sometimes I would go to work with him, but I didn’t understand the complexity of what entrepreneurship was. So I went to school and said my father was an owner of a car repair shop, and that was it.
As I was growing up my father had hopes of me getting an MBA and working at a high paying job and maybe even living downtown. I didn’t, but I did the work to get me there anyway. As I’ve mentioned before as daughter of an immigrant that push for an higher-education is strong. I was conditioned to have that as my goal. So school became my job. Getting A’s was the only option. The praise I got after a straight A report card was unmatched in my mind. It was my value. I saw that my father was working hard for his family, and he wanted his kids to have the education and opportunities he didn’t have, and I understood that. So I leaned into it. School was my priority…but I didn’t know what the end goal was exactly… but as long as I focused on what was in front of me I felt good.
Where the confusion came in was in what I was supposed to do with my good grades. I guess go to college… But then what?
And it became a bigger question when I went to school for something that wasn’t an MBA, but rather in a creative field. I”m going to get into my college story in a later episode, but it’s important to mention that during my college years, my end goal would shift every year, which is not something I was prepared for.
When I graduated high school I was like “great I made it to the end”…and I got into a college…pero, ahora que? I guess go to college and see what it’s all about, and it would all be good as long as at the end I would have that job that would pay the bills The only thing was I went to college from 2004-2008. Yeah, I graduated into recession.
I went to school 3 hours from my childhood home and for the first few years my father would drive me back and forth whenever I had a break or wanted to come home. These times ended up being the most special times in my life even now. This is when I truly understood who my father was, and even now I know that I only know a fraction of his stories. But it would be 3 hours of random stories. Stories about his past jobs, current stories about what was happening and frustrating him at work, stories about his childhood. We would laugh, and be serious, and simply enjoy each others company. It was during this time that I understood what he did. He was an entrepreneur. And not just an entrepreneur, but someone who also poured into other people and taught them and encouraged them to be entrepreneurs. He gets excited about ideas, and figuring out how to make them work and turn them into a profitable business. He still does. I realized that he valued education in his kids lives, but also in his own life. Even in his 60s he is still taking classes and learning new skills.
When I graduated college. I had no desire going into the field that I graduated in (more on that in the next episode), and with graduating into a recession, it was no surprise that I went to work for my father. I had worked with my father during summers when I was in high school, and I came home for the first two summers I was in college and literally helped him launch a new business. A Mexican restaurant. So it was no surprise that when I graduated college I asked my father if I could work for him, to which he said yes. I worked SO HARD, probably the hardest I worked in my life. I remember working from 6am to past 6pm most days. I would work in the restaurant. I would work at the other shops he had. I did all the things to help my father’s job run smoother. Accounting, Inventory, random deliveries, serving at the restaurant, being cashier, ingredient prep, dishwasher. Whatever was needed. I was tired. But fulfilled to be able to help my father in this way. And it was there that I learned and saw the potential I had to build my own business.
Ironically after burning myself out he fired me. Yes you heard that right. He fired me from his business. I was shocked. SHOCKED. But es lo que era. And so I decided to move back to Michigan, where my boyfriend at the time lived. I went to school to get certified as a CNA and started working in a nursing home in Michigan.
At the time my boyfriend had a side business taking pictures in his hometown for weddings, families, and essentially anything people needed. When we were engaged I started going with him to these sessions and started helping him out. And that was when I saw the potential of building a photography business. He knew the craft. I had the basics of photography but could learn quickly, and most importantly I knew the framework on how build a business. And I never thought in my mind that I couldn’t do it. It was just a matter of when.
Here’s where we start seeing how photography made its way into my life. I was ambitious and wanted to move his side business to Chicago and grow it so that it could support us and we could just work for ourselves. Super ambitious and filled with hope. It was muy cute.
After moving to Chicago in 2010 after we got married, I started working full time… Again, With my father…yes after some conversations he took me back as his assistant doing similar things to what I had been doing before but with clear hours. And he even employed my husband! Haha My white husband was working on the southside of Chicago in a car repair shop. Honestly it’s where he learned more spanish than he had in his spanish classes in school. It was a time for us to gain some stability while we tried to build our wedding photography business. And for that I’m so grateful to my father for allowing us that opportunity.
I worked and worked at learning journalistic photography and pairing that with weddings. I have to remind you that this was in 2010. This was before pinterest, before instagram, and before it was trendy to being the wedding/events industry. I was entering this space as it was starting to explode. And I just soaked it up. By 2011 we had finished most of our Michigan weddings and had started booking at least half of our weddings for the year in Chicago. In 2011 I stopped working for my father, which gave me the opportunity to really focus on building our business and laying the foundation for how I wanted to really serve our couples. We were starting to build our portfolio in Chicago, and I was slowly growing our profits.
By 2013 I was attending ALL the networking events, I was coordinating pretend events called “styled shoots” where we would collaborate with many vendors to produce a pretend event, and try to get our work published. After a few of these I realized that I was doing ALOT of work but not seeing the recognition that I saw my other peers getting. It was in 2014 that I had felt that I knew a lot of the people in the wedding industry. I was well connected and growing our brand in this space. I was thriving! I was excited to be building something that could serve both my husband and I and we could do it together. I was excited…but at the same time I started to notice that I wasn’t booking weddings at the same price point as my peers.
I was hosting coffee dates where people would “pick my brain” and I would be so excited to share all the things, only to see their success sky-rocket in a quarter of the time it had taken me to get to where I was in my business. I truly was happy for them, and just attributed it to me not working hard enough. Not having enough time…the fact that i had also had two kids during this time I thought was setting me back.
I pulled from my academic conditioning that if I didn’t get an A it was because I didn’t study hard enough. If I did something wrong at work it was because I wasn’t paying attention enough to know how to do it. I had this expectation to get it right the first time, to always excel, and if I wasn’t then that meant that I was not doing enough to achieve what I needed to.
And when I saw that I was getting “no’s” after booking session with potential clients meant that I wasn’t doing enough to prove my worth. I started to feel bad for what I was charging until I saw that someone who I had helped had JUST launched her business at a higher price point that I was charging 5 years in!
It was then that thankfully I met a friend, a Latina who started to share the same struggles in her photography business. I was shocked. I wasn’t alone. My thoughts weren’t just me letting my mind get tripped up.
This is when we realized…maybe…this industry wasn’t built to value us as people of color. By 2016, I had finally been able to book out a full year of weddings. I had build our business to have a healthy year of profit! YAY!
It was also the year that I decided that something needed to change. It was the year that I had the wedding that is the cornerstone of my decision to leave the wedding industry. The wedding on Cinco de Mayo that appropriated Mexican Culture right in front of me. The wedding that made me truly realize that I would always have to be working twice as hard as my peers to charge equitably and my worth…while also having to navigate blatant racism.
2016 was a pivotal year. The year where I realized I had achieved this goal of building a profitable business, But the year I decided I had to shift and let go what I had built. Now it didn’t happen overnight. I had to come to terms with the fact that my ideas about jobs and opportunity were built on a lies and biases that didn’t support me.
We finished all the weddings that we had under contract in 2016 & 2017, and in 2018 I shifted and launched something new. I also stopped marketing our photography brand and only taking weddings if they were referrals from planners that we enjoyed working with or from past clients. I started working with another company helping to grow their business so I could keep the cashflow going while I shifted. 2020 was supposed to be my last year with that company, and the year that I completely shifted to educating people about Mexican culture through my photography and selling more framed prints. Pero ya sabes what happened in 2020, and so all those plans shifted again. And here we are in 2022 finishing out the postponed weddings, and I can happily say that I am more aligned with what I’m doing. This is the last year I’m doing any kind of wedding work as I finish up my contracts that were pushed back two years, while also assisting the company I work for.
In the past two years I launched this brand Elevating la Culture and we’re going into our 5th season. And soon I’ll be opening a studio space to invite other Latina creatives to collaborate and have a space to grow their business.
I’ve grown my photography offerings by releasing three collection and new products at karinamora.com. I’ve also grown my speaking business, and have started offering guided trips to Mexico.
Most importantly I shifted my circle. My community. I stopped listening to predominately white mentors because there was always a disconnect to what they were trying to tell me to do and the results I was supposed to be seeing but wasn’t. I was conditioned to believe there was something wrong with ME…when in reality it was a disconnect with the opportunities and the networks and connections they already had that I didn’t have or have access to.
I am immensely grateful for that one friend who had the foresight to call out the skewed opportunities in the wedding/events industry for those who didn’t already have the network or access to money for top equipment. Because I was asked on many client meetings what gear I had. As if the brand of equipment was more important than the skill. Ignorant questions that really place an unnecessary divide based on class.
Shout out to Jasmine from The Firehouse Dream from episode 4 who was that light for me to help me realize that I wasn’t alone in being offended by some of the experiences we had in the wedding & events industry. We’re still really great friends and are both working towards shifting the entrepreneurial narrative for the next generation. You can listen to her story on episode 4.
I share this part of my story because it’s the foundation of who I am as an entrepreneur today. And being an entrepreneur is a HUGE part of my life. I joke that I don’t think I will ever stop working…or building businesses…or at least helping others build theirs. I know this because I see my father doing the same way. He has since sold all of his businesses and still he is reaching for the next thing he can learn or do.
I have gone through a lot of healing about how much pressure I put on myself from such an early age to excel in school, to realizing that as I built my business my value was not placed on how fast I grew our business or how much money I made because the playing field wasn’t fair in the first place. Instead I’ve learned to focus on the impact I’m having for my family and my peers around me. It’s so important for me to have these conversations because I need people to know that they aren’t alone. We’ve all been conditioned to assimilate, to code switch, to simply be thankful for each opportunity we have, and not really advocate for ourselves.
It’s not you. It’s the system, that has not been built for us. But I’m determined in helping change it. And it starts with conversations like this…so we can realize we’re not alone.
The next episode I’m going to be going a little deeper into my how my identity as a Mexican-American has shifted throughout my life.
I’m always up for continuing the conversations so subscribe to the podcast so you don’t miss when an episode goes live. I also encourage you to share with others because the more people we have talking about our stories as Latines living in the US, the easier it will be to make a collective change for a better future.
There will be a new episode every Tuesday, so after you listen feel free to take a screenshot to post on IG and tag @elevatinglacultura or send me a DM. You can also comment on our YouTube video if you’re watching online. I always like to hear from people and how they resonate with the stories I share. SO leave a review on apple podcasts so we can get more ears listening to these stories and we can continue elevating la cultura.
I’m also excited to announce our first in-person one day event called “Cultura Presente: Celebra tus Raices”, where we are diving deep on how to deconstruct our relationship with assimilation and recognize our cultural power. Shout out to my partner Sandy from Beautea Queens, and collaborators Izzy and Daisy from the Hablando Claro Podcast, and our host location Neuroyoga Institute. Get all the info at elevatinalacultura.com/events. I really hope you join. It’s going to be an amazing event.
Alright, enjoy the rest of the day/afternoon/evening whenever you’re listening, y nos vemos next week.
