In the last report I sent, I shared that I am a survivor of a boat wreck, and the new layer of resilience gained through that horrific experience. Yet as I look deeper into my life, as I keep leading Agtools©, it is where and who raised me which have provided me with the tools of resilience. As you see in the picture, my mother, Isabel, was a business leader not only in our family but also in the education industry, founding and operating schools and universities.
This was in Colombia decades ago, at a time when women were not “empowered”, and she and my grandmother, also a business entrepreneur, were my role models and my inspiration. I look back today and have to feel so blessed as I saw a business leader, a visionary and a passionate worker – as she regularly put in 18-hour workdays. She took the concept of night school and universities for working classes, put forth by my father and two other professors, and built the educational business from the ground up and successfully managed multiple schools and universities. I worked with her since I was a child, saw her innovate by establishing the first program of breakfasts for kids going to school, and implementing new computer systems to keep up with management and accounting while scaling up from a handful of employees to hundreds of them. Today, I see how I use those “teachings and lessons” to start scaling up Agtools©. I still have my mother to thank for her many insights and showing me that taking on the challenges day to day is a “normal” part of business.