Louis Barajas is a lifelong businessman. At the age of 11, in Southern California, Louis helped his father launch and manage his welding business before embarking on a career as a financial planner.
In the 30-plus years since he started his professional journey, Louis has earned his Certified Exit Planning Advisor (CEPA®) designation and become an expert in helping Hispanic and Latino entrepreneurs enhance their financial literacy and create significant companies.
As Hispanic Heritage Month marches on, Louis shares the importance of the growing Hispanic business community and how CEPAs can get involved and make a lasting impact.
The True Purpose of a Business
While it's important to celebrate the achievements and momentum of Hispanic and Latino entrepreneurs, it's just as critical to understand the challenges within their community.
According to Louis, perhaps the most significant hurdle these business owners face is learning to separate their personal identity from their business itself. He says this creates a problem for business owners looking to grow their business, citing a concept Dan Sullivan, founder and president of Strategic Coach, calls the Ceiling of Complexity.
“The problem is that (Hispanic business owners) sometimes lack the formal education of how to build a business, so they have trouble growing because they don't have the proper structure to do so,” Louis says.
In other words, according to Louis, Hispanic and Latino business owners tend to be lifestyle business owners rather than value creators, as described in Walking to Destiny: 11 Actions an Owner Must Take to Rapidly Grow Value & Unlock Wealth. They can be so ingrained in the business's day-to-day operations that they struggle to create extractable value.
Or, in Louis’s own words, “I saw that people who were making it out of the barrio, like my father, were creating jobs for themselves, not businesses. There was plenty of income coming in, but there was no value in their equity.”
This can lead to burnout and feed into the Five Ds (Divorce, Disagreement, Disability, Distress, and Death). Louis points to a quote from Michael E. Gerber, best-selling author of business books including The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work And What to Do About It, that he says, sums up the issue well: “The purpose of a business is to give you more life, not to suck the life out of you.”
Financial Roadblocks
Hispanic-owned businesses can also face financial challenges at a higher rate than their white-owned business counterparts, stemming from their overall lack of a proper business structure, according to Louis.
“(Hispanic-owned businesses) are undercapitalized because, when they don't have formal financial structures where they can offer proper financial statements to a bank, it's hard for them to get loans even from the (Small Business Administration),” he says.
According to the Federal Reserve’s 2025 Small Business Credit Survey, 29% of Hispanic respondents were denied on an application for a loan or line of credit in 2024, while only 39% were fully approved. Only 18% of white-owned businesses were denied, while 56% were fully approved.
In addition to the 29% of Hispanic businesses denied a loan or line of credit, 33% of those surveyed didn’t even bother applying because they did not think they would be approved. It’s statistics like these that led Louis to become a CEPA.
Supporting a Growing Community
Even with those financial challenges, the Hispanic business community is growing rapidly. According to the Small Business Administration’s statistics, 14.5% of US business owners in 2022 were Hispanic, an increase of 13% from 2021. As of 2025, there are more than 5 million Hispanic-owned businesses in the U.S., contributing more than $800 billion to the economy annually.
As those numbers grow, there is plenty of opportunity for CEPAs to use the Value Acceleration Methodology™ to guide Hispanic business owners through the aforementioned challenges.
“As a CEPA, you can help a business owner by helping them understand that we need to let go of their pride, and that, at some point, their business must not be about them. It has to be able to run without them, and that’s how they can create multi-generational wealth for their family,” adds Louis.
Specifically, by highlighting the importance of the Personal Leg of the Stool, CEPAs can connect with Hispanic Business owners and help this growing community thrive. The best thing about it, Louis says, is that it doesn’t matter what your background is, as long as you come into this world with the right attitude.
“You don’t have to be Hispanic or speak Spanish,” he adds. “What you have to do is care about the community and be willing to respect their culture. (Hispanic business owners) care about the same thing everyone else does, they want to create an opportunity for their children, their families, and their communities.”
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