Bísness School is coming back for another season! Hear from the Latino entrepreneurs behind companies like Rizos Curls, Siete Foods and I Love Chamoy. New episodes start Sept. 10.

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What do music mogul Emilio Estefan, filmmaker Robert Rodriguez and Oscar Muñoz, the first Latino CEO of United Airlines, have in common? They’ve all done business with Gary Acosta, a man who Hispanic Business Magazine has named as one of 100 most influential Hispanics in the United States. Gary Acosta has been on a 20-plus year mission to increase Hispanic homeownership. In 2001, he co-founded the National Association of Hispanic Real Estate Professionals or NAHREP. Today, NAHREP is one of the largest Hispanic business organizations in the country with more than 40,000 members and 100 local chapters. Since co-founding NAHREP, the businessman has launched the Hispanic Wealth Project, which aims to boost the economic status of Latinos, and L’ATTITUDE, his most ambitious project to date, which aims to be SXSW for Latinos. In our last season one episode of Bísness School, Gary tells us what he learned from playing D3 college basketball under Gregg Poppovich, the many ways the financial crisis of 2008 crushed his organization overnight and then supercharged it, and why he and his co-founder call Latinos the “new mainstream economy.”

We'll be back with new episodes this fall. Go back to our feed and listen to previous episodes in the meantime, and above all, enjoy your summer break from Bísness School!

Follow NAHREP at https://www.instagram.com/nahrep/.

Follow L'ATTITUDE at https://www.instagram.com/lattitudeevent

Follow Fernando Hurtado at https://www.instagram.com/byfernandoh

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

When companies like Honda want to launch a new pickup truck, and they want that vehicle to do well with Hispanic consumers, they don’t just go with their gut feeling to figure out what that consumer wants. Instead, they hire a market research firm to tell them what that consumer wants. Yet 20 years ago, market research firms couldn’t really tell you. They could tell you what general American consumers wanted, but not Hispanic Americans wanted. Mario Carrasco built the largest online Hispanic research panel companies could use to tune into this segment’s needs. But he didn’t stop there. Convinced that the future of the United States wasn’t Hispanic, but rather, multicultural, Mario and his co-founder Roy created ThinkNow, a multicultural market research firm with clients like Honda and Google and more than 50 employees across four countries. Mario joins Bísness School to explain how he went from a high school English teacher to a pedigreed marketing professional, how he started his company with a 500-dollar prepaid debit card and what ThinkNow has taught him about American consumers and the future of the country.

This episode was produced by Fernando Hurtado and edited by James Jeffrey.

Follow ThinkNow at http://www.instagram.com/thinknowglobal.

Follow Fernando Hurtado at http://instagram.com/byfernandoh.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.