Here’s Why Mentorship can Help Close the Racial Wealth Gap

“It was two or three jobs for each of them for many years,” recalls Luis Yepez. “They had larger aspirations for my brother Juan and me.” His mother eventually became an electrologist and his father an envelope machine mechanic.

Luis, the older of the two, went to private schools funded by his parents’ work, was accepted by the U.S. Naval Academy and is an Iraq war veteran, still in the reserves. He was working in Minnesota for a company that produced implantable pacemakers and defibrillators when his brother called him in 2000 and suggested they go into business together.

This was the start of Mainstream Global, an ITAD (Information Technology Asset Disposition) company based in Lawrence, Massachusetts. Mainstream Global refurbishes computers when possible, and when not, disposes of them and safely destroys data in environmentally responsible ways. Juan Yepez is the CEO, and Luis Yepez is the COO.

They brought dreams, drive and know-how to the work, but there were rocky moments in those early days, most notably when New England’s so-called Mothers’ Day Flood in 2006 caused the Merrimack River to rise 30 feet. Mainstream Global had a warehouse along the riverbanks “and we lost close to $400,000 of inventory,” Yepez recalls.

They survived that, but watched their business plateau. “We didn’t know how to expand or increase our profit margins. Our network of advisors got tapped out,” Yepez recalls.

That’s when the brothers connected to FBE and Michael Hicks, an entrepreneur and advisor working with BEI at its inception, who embedded in the company in the autumn of 2018, becoming a strategic advisor, mentor, and eventually, a personal friend.

“This is what differentiates FBE,” Yepez says. “We dedicated the first three months to developing a five-year plan, and the next nine months to implementing the key aspects. Michael was able to call the baby ugly when he needed to. If we hadn’t had this, I think the business would have plateaued.”

Hicks credited Yepez and his team for being responsive to the process. “Here’s a complete stranger and you’re going to open up,” he says. “How do you create trust? Luis and his team were receptive. The work is important to me because by nature, I’m not a protester, but I think I can have a much broader impact by addressing the problem of income inequality at its root cause.”

From its start in 2000 with three employees in a 600-square-foot office, today Yepez says Mainstream Global is on track to reach $50 million annual revenue by the end of 2022, a 100 percent increase since when the company began working with BEI. Mainstream Global currently employees 52 people in the U.S. and another 55 in Latin America, 59 percent of whom are Hispanic and 41 percent of whom are women.

Yepez notes that his business is founded on the philosophy of a commitment to community and mutual respect that his parents taught him and his brother, and that’s now enabling Mainstream Global to help provide the income for its workers to pay for private schools or other advantages for their children, benefitting both them and their community.