"A Poor Man Sitting In A Chair of Gold"
The following is a joint blog post between Donald Ross and Becca Ramspott.
On our flight from Lima to Cuzco, we met Mabel Dongo, who graduated in 2004 with a degree in business from Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Peru, the very same institution where we discussed leadership and met with business students. She’s a general manager of Rapimagen S.A. , a successful digital printing company. Mabel was on her way to sign a contract in Cuzco when we met her.
She talked about how her parents built everything from the ground up so that she and her siblings could have a good life. They came from single-parent families and worked incredibly hard to establish Rapimagen S.A. 30 years ago, which has done very well. “Here in Peru, it’s easier to start your own company. Maybe in the U.S. you need a lot of money,” she said. “Here in Peru we say to ‘Make Peru.’”
But running your own business has its challenges.
“When it’s a big company and there is a problem with water or electricity or something like that, someone else fixes it,” Mabel said. “ When it’s your own company, you have to fix it. … People have to believe and to be motivated. You have to work very hard.”
Mabel admires and loves her parents for ensuring that Rapimagen S.A. has been successful.
“That’s why I can’t disappear … that’s why I want to study more, get an M.B.A.”
Mabel also talked about how despite its focus on entrepreneurship, Peru struggles to take advantage of its many opportunities to be stronger economically.
“There is a Peruvian saying: ‘A poor man sitting in a chair of gold,’” she said. “We have a lot of things and we can do a lot of things but we don’t know how to get the benefits.”
This made us think of the following quote:
“Peru’s natural bounty should make it the envy of other nations. It has vast mineral resources in gold, silver, copper, zinc, lead, and iron, and extensive deposits of oil and natural gas lying under its surface," Peru: In Focus, pg. 42.
