“I love a challenge,” says International Business Relations' founder and CEO Natalia Frios. “Bring me a problem, and I’ll work hard to find a solution.” This community-driven entrepreneur — and trilingual interpreter — helped organize the first Latino Business Expo on Cape Cod (in Spanish) and hosts the Latino Business Networking mentor and sponsorship program. She earned her Master’s in Business Administration (MBA) with a concentration in Healthcare Informatics from Cambridge College, and completed her Bachelor’s degree in Spanish at UMass Dartmouth. She also advocates for women, human rights and social equality as a commissioner at the Cape Cod & Islands Commission on the Status of Women, and she’s on the Board of the Hyannis Public Library.

While still working on her MBA, she began advising her father on his auto mechanic business — and the positive results quickly caught the community’s attention. Soon family members who ran small businesses and other entrepreneurs were asking for her advice, and her business-consulting journey began.

Born in Guanhaes, Minas Gerais, in the Southeast region of Brazil, Natalia arrived in the U.S. in 1999 with parents here to pursue the American Dream. The family received Permanent Resident Cards (also known as green cards) just in time for Natalia to apply for scholarships and financial aid to college. She was pre-med, studying medical laboratory science. After a hiatus halfway through her Bachelor’s program to care for her newborn daughter Victoria, she turned a minor in Spanish into her major and became a licensed Portuguese interpreter, eventually adding a license as a Spanish interpreter. And while working at Falmouth hospital as an interpreter, she was introduced to the organization’s information-technology (IT) department, which laid another important foundation for her future work.

Natalia talked with Amplify’s Tamora Israel.

Amplify: What does your company offer?

Natalia: I help Latino small business owners build their business plans and organize around a strategic goal. I guide them in strategic planning, help them identify the right action plans, and guide them through the whole process. I also host the Latino Business Network, a weekly meeting (now online) for Latino entrepreneurs to receive mentorship with education and sponsorship packages. Most members are Brazilian but the meetings are open to all Latinos. Our meetings are in Portuguese and interpreted in Spanish when we have a Spanish member in the room. My goal is to help Latino entrepreneurs have their voices heard, and help their businesses grow to be successful. I cannot do everything, none of us can, but I have a huge resource and know a lot of people that I can connect clients to.

Amplify: What inspired you to get into this business?

Natalia: I like to help people. I was raised and taught to help my community. I saw the problems and I started to get inspired. Entrepreneurs provide solutions to people’s problems. I started having ideas on how to solve these problems for small businesses. My parents, my uncle, my family are all small business owners. While I was getting my MBA and doing all these individual and group projects, and I started thinking, how can I help my community with the skills I already have? I started to have all these great ideas about consultation and business relations.

In 2019, I realized there was nothing on the Cape that united the whole Latino community in their own languages, Portuguese and Spanish. I went to a Brazilian networking expo and noticed there weren’t a lot of people there, and they didn’t have access to up-to-date information. They thought networking was going out for coffee, making friends and just talking. They were not advocating for their entrepreneurs. But when I went to an English-language networking expo, there was a lot of information. Most entrepreneurs on Cape are small business owners like my Dad; my Dad’s English is limited — he couldn’t follow along in a calls taught in English.

Amplify: When did you start International Business Relations?

Natalia: I launched in January 2020. When the pandemic hit, people were looking to me to help them even more. I had different jobs and different hats to wear in the community.

Amplify: How did you go about starting your business? What steps did you take?

Natalia: I helped my Dad and his friends with their businesses for six years. I help the community organize their businesses in a different way, and they started paying me out of gratitude. I said, “You know what? This is a business. I’m providing consultation for them. I am providing business relations for them.”

I was invited to a Brazilian Business Expo in April 2019 where I discovered Score, and started getting mentorship from them. Then I asked local small business owners that I knew for sponsorship to get events off the ground; in return, I would promote their business. In three weeks, I had sponsorship for the first Spanish Business Expo on the Cape, in November 2019.

A lot of Spanish-speaking entrepreneurs went to that conference, even people from off Cape went. They wanted more education in Spanish. From that conference, I launched Latino Business Networking, a continuation of what we learned there.

Amplify: What obstacles did you encounter along the way?

Natalia: I had a business plan when I launched my company in January 2020, and then I had to redo everything in March because of the pandemic. The business plan I had in January had all my events were in person. I was barely doing anything online. Now I’m totally online. I had to reinvent myself. In the business world, we’re always reinventing ourselves. I feel for the business owners that had to close their businesses down because of the pandemic. The pandemic is just an obstacle. We all have obstacles in our businesses but we have to keep going and reinventing ourselves.

Also, many entrepreneurs and small businesses around the Cape have never written a business plan. Some don’t even know what a business plan or a strategic action plan is. It’s so important to know who your public is, who you're selling your products and services to. They’re great, hard-working people who just got out there and started a business, but that’s not enough. You need a business plan and you need to keep adding to it; you need to plan for emergencies.

Amplify: How have recent events and the country's current financial climate affected your business?

Natalia: I actually grew my business. It brought me more clients and I broke my shell of the digital world. I finally had the courage to quit my full-time job and work full time for myself. It was scary but it was a relief because I’m doing something I love right now.

You have to challenge yourself. That’s what I tell my clients and that’s what I tell myself every day. We are entrepreneurs and it’s risky; it’s risky every day. We live in a competitive world. You really need to love what you do, you need to love your clients, you need to love your staff, and you need to love the solutions you provide for them.

Amplify: Where do you see your business in five years?

Natalia: Hopefully I’ll be international, providing services for three different countries. Hopefully, I’ll be in Brazil, the United States, and I want to branch out into Europe one day. Right now my focus is on my community, my Brazilian and U.S. people. — Tamora Israel

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On the Web: https://www.internationalbusinessrelations.com/
On Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Internationalbusinessrelations
On Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/latinobusinessnetworking/