All articles

Believe in your team -- and other advice from Zumba's Alberto Perlman

October 09, 2013·Nancy Dahlberg

By Juan Chaparro

Entrepreneurship is hard.

Yes, it’s true. In fact, as it gets easier and easier to start companies, it’s getting harder to make any real traction and acquire those initial paying customers. In this interview with Alberto Perlman, I realized that scaling massively is not a task for the faint hearted. Especially the current über crowded marketplace for just about any product or service. Fortunately, there is hope, and yes, you can still make it big! Zumba’s CEO shares with us advice about their success in the fitness world and how you can apply the discussed concepts to your startup -- or any kind of business.

Perlman Two weeks ago I attended the Festival of Media LatAm 2013. There was a great panel of speakers from all over Latin America, but Zumba’s story caught my attention in full force. Myself being a Colombian entrepreneur, I was honored to join Alberto Perlman (pictured here) in the press room and to tap into his brain in this interview.

If you know Spanish good for you! Listen to my interview here with Alberto Perlman. Otherwise, here are the takeaways from my interview.

* Scalability is the key. Finding that business model that can grow wildly is top priority.  You should be testing everything possible until you discover how to take your company global. That means finding your business model takes longer than expected, so be prepared for it.

* Entrepreneurship is hard. Long gone are the days with low competition. As the Internet facilitates new startups, the marketplace is flooded with hungry startups. “The key to success is: Persistence,” says Perlman. Most people give up too easily, or go by the books only. Persist until you get to your first goal.

* Believe in your team. One the keys for Zumba was their team of instructors who believed in the company, but Zumba, first had to believe in them, by creating ZIN (Zumba Instructors Network), its proprietary educational portal to teach instructors how to run their classes and run their Zumba businesses.

* Constantly be improving. For 16 years, the Zumba team has been fine-tuning and improving its business model, year by year. “For many years we were ignored, now no one can catch up with us in the industry,” says Perlman. Definitely, constantly improving does have an unfair advantage.

So you heard him and you can  make it happen. It will be harder and may take longer than you planned for, but it is possible.

Juan Chaparro is the co-founder of Rebels Defy, a user interface design studio in Miami for web and mobile applications.