The Bridge She's Building

Every August, the Okoboji Entrepreneurial Institute brings 30+ college students from across Iowa to the lakes region for a week of pitching, coaching and figuring out what kind of business owner they actually want to be. This year was the 20th class and I had the honor of coaching a few of them. One conversation is still sitting with me and I had to take the weekend to really let it sit with me before writing this.

Her name is Mitzully Morales. She's a marketing student at the University of Northern Iowa, and her budding business idea is called Puente Marketing. It means "bridge" in Spanish.

Check her out on KCAUs recent broadcast here.

What Puente Is

Mitzully's idea is not complicated to explain, but it is not easy to do.

Puente helps Hispanic-owned businesses in northwest Iowa communicate what they actually offer, in a way that people outside the Spanish-speaking community can understand and connect with. Not translation for its own sake, but a real cultural interpretation, so that a product or service lands the way it's meant to.

She wants to help these businesses market themselves on their own terms, to an audience that might not speak their language or share their cultural reference points, without losing what makes them distinct.

A Table, Some Coaches and a Hard Question

When Mitzully sat down at my table, she'd already spent the morning getting feedback from a great group of coaches, several of them longtime manufacturing and business leaders in the region. Many of them employing the same immigrant families she is looking to help market. She was working through how to take all of that advice and shape it into a presentation that was actually hers and that was both meaningful and helpful to sellers and potential buyers.

Student Clare Simmons sitting down with me to discuss her business idea. Photo Courtesy: F8 Creative

Some of what she'd heard pushed her away from leaning into the cultural piece of her pitch, the part about labor and community history that ties so many Hispanic families to northwest Iowa. I understood the instinct behind that advice. I also felt something sharper and more protective rise up in me, something I had to consciously set aside before I could be useful to her.

I've carried my own history with the disconnect between the Hispanic community and the white business community here, my own version of feeling unseen or reduced to one part of a bigger story. It would have been easy to hand her my own reaction instead of helping her find hers. I'm glad I didn't.

I was born in Spain to a Spanish mother raised in an urban setting in one of the largest cities in Southern Spain. My father, part of a large, Iowa farming family from Sibley, Iowa growing up on a Walnut grove and helping his father and grandfather with their farming implement businesses (Minneapolis Moline if we want to get specific).

We were a military family in the 80s and when my father's work with STRATCOM brought us

Tortilla Española (Spanish Tortilla)

back stateside, my mother's first request was simple, she wanted to find somewhere that served tortillas. What she didn't know yet was that "tortilla" doesn't mean the same thing everywhere. In Spain, a tortilla is closer to a thick hearty quiche made with eggs, potatoes, onions and fried in olive oil. It looks nothing like the flour or corn tortilla that wraps a taco or a burrito, which is what most people here mean when they say the word. Even within the language she grew up speaking, my mother found out that words travel differently than we expect.

That is the whole problem Mitzully is trying to solve and it is the reason her business matters. Culture and language carry meaning that does not always translate cleanly, even between people who share a heritage. Puente Marketing is looking to exist to close that gap on purpose, so that a business owner's story gets told the way it was meant to be heard.

Finding Her Own Answer

I could have told Mitzully exactly what I thought she should do with her pitch. I had opinions, oh do I ever! But that is not coaching and it is not what she needed from me.

So instead I asked her the only question that mattered,

"What do you want to do, Mitzully? Not what the other coaches want... and, not what I want you to do."

What was true for her.

I watched something shift in her when she let herself answer that honestly.

She didn't need to be like me - and she didn't need to be like the coaches who'd steered her away from the cultural angle. She needed to be exactly who she is, building exactly the business she set out to build, one that holds both communities in the same hand and lifts them up together.

That is what a bridge does.

PUENTE.

It doesn't put one side down to elevate the other. It connects two things that were always meant to reach each other.

Thursday Night

I went to the closing celebration for the first time this year. I've coached at OEI before, but I'd never stayed for the final dinner. And, boy am I'm glad I did.

As I sat down, as I typically try to do, choosing an empty table, I was quickly surrounded by women of all backgrounds, students and business owners alike, asking each other real questions.

The topics at the table floored me. It wasn't what are you all going to do tonight to celebrate, it wasn't what new purse they purchased... it was, questions like

What is it actually like to run a business? How early do you get up to get started? Should I work for someone else first, or jump straight into building my own thing?

I didn't have a clean answer for that one.

Iowa Lakes Corridor CEO Curt Strouth addressing the crowd prior to announcing winners.

My path is what it's been, and I'm grateful for it, but I told them the only thing I know for sure - the question isn't what your mom or your professor or another business owner thinks you should do.

It's what you want to do.

The rest can shift at any point in your life.

Mitzully winning first place in her category.

When they announced the category winners, Mitzully's name was called, she took first in her category. She'd followed her instinct, built the pitch that was actually hers, and it worked. Afterwards, we hugged, we both held back tears and she couldn't wait to call her mom!

I started Vertical Marketing + Design less than six years ago. Standing at that dinner, I realized I am still a new entrepreneur myself, not so different from the students asking me questions across the table. Coaching Mitzully didn't just help her find her footing. It reflected something back at me about my own path and about how much I still have to learn from people at every stage of building something. That mirroring, her growth handing something back to me, is as much a part of this story as anything I gave her.

Celebrating Mitzully's win!

Where This Is Taking Me

I started at Iowa Lakes Community College right after I finished my own degree at UNI, back in the early 2000s. I didn't know it then, but that was the beginning of a thread that's run through everything since - I keep finding my way back to rooms full of people trying to figure out what they're building - and I keep wanting to be in them.

When I was six years old, I watched my 12-year old brother die.

I don't say that for shock value. I say it because it's where I first learned that life can change in an instant and that lesson has shaped how I move through everything since. It's given me a strength and a clarity that let me pivot without a lot of stress when the ground shifts under me, which it does, again and again, in this work - and in life.

Coaching at OEI reminded me of that lesson in a new way.

Coaching at OEI this year didn't feel like a side project. It felt like a signal.

I'm realizing that connecting people, building relationships across cultures, generations, and industries, is not separate from what Vertical Marketing + Design does.

It is the work. It is my work.

Every pitch I help a client sharpen, every brand story I help translate for a new audience, is the same bridge-building Mitzully is doing with Puente, just wearing a different name.

This week, I'm pitching my own ideas too, to clients and mentors I respect, thinking hard about where I want to take Vertical Marketing + Design next.

Faculty and coaches have reached out since OEI wrapped last week, telling me what they noticed in the students after visiting my table - and what they noticed in me. It reminded me that I have a real passion for teaching and for being around students, one I want to keep nurturing alongside the client work I already do.

Watching Mitzully find her own answer reminded me why I got into this work in the first place, not to hand people my playbook, but to help them build theirs. It's not about selling anything. It's about connecting people and telling their stories clearly.

Thank you Mitzully for sharing your passions - and believing in yourself! Congratulations!

What Twenty Years Has Built

OEI has run for twenty years now because of the businesses, host families, sponsors and mentors across the Iowa Lakes region who keep showing up for it, year after year. Host families feed these students, take them in as their own for six days and some stay close with them for years afterward. I heard many alumni sharing that they come back for Thansgiving or Christmas to spend time connecting with their original host family. None of what happened at those tables, or on that dock, or at that closing dinner, happens without

that foundation.

Thank you OEI founders and sponsors.

I hope the next twenty years of OEI bring even more minority and immigrant students into that room. I've seen firsthand that the talent is there and that it deserves the same seat at the table as the strongest business idea in the room, whether that idea comes out of manufacturing, marketing or a business nobody else at the table has thought to build yet.

Mitzully is building a bridge. I'm looking forward to watching where she takes it, and I'm grateful I got to sit at the table while she found her own way there. Thank you to everyone who was part of the journey during my time at OEI this year. Students, fellow coaches, host families and sponsors - this only works because you all show up for it.