Color Magazine Online

Interview with Marie Diaz

Prior to starting her human resources management company, Pursuit of Excellence, Marie Diaz came home from one of her monthly, three-week-long business trips to find herself locked out of her home. When her housekeeper - who was taking care of Diaz's three boys - opened the door, her furniture was rearranged and her boys were nowhere to be found. Frustrated and exhausted, she demanded an explanation. Turns out, her housekeeper had changed the locks as a precaution after misplacing the keys, and the boys had been rearranging the house and were cooking all day to surprise their mother. "I felt about two inches tall," recalled Diaz. The next day she quit her job.

Taking the skills and knowledge she gained from working for a Fortune 500 company, she decided she could do it for herself. She was right - after sixteen years as CEO, she has received dozens of awards and recognitions for her business and community service, including the National Anne Maria Arias Award given to the top ten Latina entrepreneurs in the country.

CM: When you were a kid did you have an entrepreneurial streak? Did you have a lemonade stand or something?
MD: Did I try and do something at a young age to make money? (laughs) Not really, I was more involved in the community. My mother was very big into helping people. Never really on the entrepreneur side, although I did start working at an early age. I was 14 going on 15.

CM: What was your first job?
MD: You're going to laugh. I worked as a waitress at Burger King.

CM: Did you learn anything that translates to your work today?
MD: Oh absolutely. One of the reasons why I had to work was I came from a very poor background, and I wanted to help contribute to my family. I grew up catholic and so I went to catholic schools - you're kind of in your own little world there. When I got the job it makes you meet all these different kinds of people with different kinds of thoughts, ways they dress - I mean we wore uniforms all the time. So it was a big eye-opener and I definitely was very curious growing up. My mom always used to say that I would make a good attorney because I'm always asking questions. That is something that I still use today, but now it helps me clarify what people are saying and their thought process.

CM: You came from a poor background, yet your mother still felt strongly about giving back.
MD: She believed there is always someone out there who has it harder, which was one of things that she taught me. My real father had died at a young age, when I was three. And my stepfather was an alcoholic... with that, he was very physically abusive to my mother and I guess you can imagine growing up in that environment. Even with all of that, she was always about, it's not what happens to you, it's how you handle it. This is where all these positive sayings that ring in my head come from. If you do something negative, negative is going to come back and that gets you nowhere. So you might as well handle it positively. Her biggest saying that has always stuck in my head - not to cry. She would say, and this is the catholic side coming out, whatever you have, if it's worse than having nails put through your hands and feet and ran through a street with people who you thought were your friends making fun of you, then you can cry. But if it's not worse, then let's figure it out and get something positive from it.

Well, when you tell a kid that, where do you go with that? (laughs)

Well you always help people no matter who they might be. She would always invite people over for dinner and go to kitchens where they served people who were less fortunate than us. We always had to be OK with that, because she always brought us kids along with her.

CM: The lesson of never crying, did it help you when you were starting your business?
MD: It really did because I didn't have a lot of money to start my business. It made me look at things from the standpoint of, how do we figure this out? I don't want to hear what we can't do. I want to hear how can we get it done. I think that had such an impact on me, and it still does today.

CM: Was there ever a point where you doubted that starting this business was a good idea?
MD: Yes. My mother died the same year I started my business. And she was my biggest inspiration. Every time I came to her she always came back with something. You know how you just want to lean on someone at times? She was definitely that to me.

When I had quit my job that I had prior to starting Pursuit of Excellence, one of the reasons why I was quitting was because I was in Australia speaking, and there was a women who was also speaking. She was quitting a 1.2-million-dollar-a-year position. It was amazing to me and the media was talking about it, and they asked her if it was because her kids needed her. She said, it wasn't that her kids needed her, because they had obviously been growing without her, it was that she needed her kids, and her life back. At what point in your life do you decide that your net worth has nothing to do with your self worth?

It really made me look at who I was, and the simple fact that I grew up poor - and I always say it was rich in love - but she taught me how to get over those kinds of things. You know how you don't realize what you have until its taken away from you? Me striving to do what I had to do was all about net worth. When I started working, my first husband passed away, my first son was three years old, and it took me quite a bit of time to get over that. I share with individuals that I don't know if I would be who I am today without some of the tragedies that happened in my life, my drive and determination would probably be a little bit different. I don't think I would have the drive that the only person you can count on is you to make something happen - create the opportunities if they aren't there for you. Be creative because that truly is what the world is made on.

CM: And that translated to you starting your own business?
MD: Exactly. I wanted my life back. I wanted my family. I thought to myself, that if I can do what I did working for a fortune 500 company and growing so much in eight years. And travelling around and speaking - I could do it for myself. The things that kept playing in my head were the sayings from my mother.

CM: Sixteen years later your business is doing quite well and you have received numerous recognitions. Does that validate your decision from a professional standpoint?
MD: I don't look at the accomplishments as validation; I look at them as stepping-stones. There's so much more that I want to do. One of the things that is important to me, because it is our motto, is to give back to our community.
I also think that if I can do it, anyone can do it. I really had no major training. I just had the mindset, what I don't know, I will know. There's so many resources out there and people. My mother always used to say I had an old soul, because I always talked to older people. They had the best stories, they looked at things differently than people my age. I think that's how I feel, as I look at some of my accomplishments, and can give back to the community.

CM: If you got to start over, start your business again, what would you do differently?
MD: Oh my gosh, if I knew everything I learned from about seven years and on. Survival in business is what you are learning the first one to seven years. Then you look back and see all of these things you've tried, and you fine-tune them. We've been very blessed in that we have doubled in size in the past four years and we will double again this year, as of today. I think that I would implement everything I started seven years later from the start. I think we would have been a lot more successful early on.

CM: Could you have avoided some of that if someone had helped you? What advice would you give to someone starting a business?
MD: Absolutely. The entrepreneur's strengths are that they are very creative and they are very ego driven. They have to be, in some sense, as the presidents or CEOs going out and selling their products or services. But I think that also starting out you feel like you have to know everything, and you feel like you can't tell anyone your problems and you don't seek help. I think what I learned after that seven-year period is that its OK to ask for help. It's OK not to know everything, and it's even OK to share that with people! I think that was the biggest lesson I ever had to learn, and that was when I really started growing. You keep making mistakes and you realize that other people have made those mistakes too.

CM: Tell me a little bit about the book you're writing.
MD: It's called, If You Knew You Couldn't Fail, What Would You Do? It's written in twelve chapters, you go through each chapter and read about methodologies and different people and successes, but it also talks a lot about how I use these 12 steps. If you use these 12 steps, in a year you'll start seeing some results. Whether it's entrepreneurship, starting your own business, your personal life or your professional life, if you use these steps you will gain a higher degree of success.

My motto is that success doesn't come to you, you have to go get it - but one thing I emphasize is that success is different for everyone. To some it's owning a business, to some it's having a successful marriage, to some it's having five kids. But at the end of the day, what does it mean to you and how are you going to get to it? You have to have the mindset: If I knew I couldn't fail how would I do it? If you don't have that mindset you start putting limitations on yourself. It's about taking those self-limitations away and creating the plan to get you to a higher degree of success.