A millennial left his job to start a consulting business and booked $400k in revenue in the first year. He shares his advice on launching a startup.

Mario Vasquez Zuniga founded a creative consulting business in June 2023 after leaving his salaried job

Mario Vasquez Zuniga, 29, got a taste of entrepreneurship three years before he launched his own business.

In 2020, he helped his mother and stepfather open Petals Florist Shop, a brick-and-mortar flower and gift shop in Palmdale, California. They managed the store while Vasquez Zuniga helped them with marketing, in addition to balancing his full-time job as a digital consultant at Lucas Public Affairs, a communications firm. But he craved something more.

“I was kind of feeling stagnant in my growth and really just wanted something more,” he said. “It made sense for me to take a step back on work and try to recalibrate where I wanted to be, where I saw myself in the next couple of years, and who I wanted to be.”

In 2023, Vasquez Zuniga quit his job and cofounded Collective, a consulting firm, with former colleague Thea Appling. Their business focuses on creative and strategic communications for business owners, advocacy groups, and nonprofits in the Sacramento area.

After a year in business, the duo booked $400,000 in revenue, according to documents reviewed by B-17.

Vasquez Zuniga is one of many people trying their hand at entrepreneurship in recent years. According to the Treasury Department, there have been over 19 million business applications since 2020, when the pandemic spurred an entrepreneurship boom.

To be sure, business applications don’t always turn into successful companies. And about one in four US-based businesses fail within the first year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Vasquez Zuniga said taking a chance on entrepreneurship was daunting, but there were tangible steps he took to determine if his idea was fit for execution.

“It was a really hard decision to leave a comfortable salaried job for the unknown,” he said. “But I was able to find some work and potential clients to work with, so it gave me that sort of confidence to be able to leave my job.”

In fact, he said talking to and leaning on others for advice is key to entrepreneurship.

Get your ducks in a row before launching

Vasquez Zuniga and his mother moved to the US from El Salvador when he was a child, and he said they were a low-income household as he grew up.

Vasquez Zuniga is a first-generation college graduate who earned his degree from San Francisco State University in 2016. After finishing school, he pursued a career in communications and public affairs.

He said he enjoyed working for a large company but desired more flexibility and wanted to pursue something more creative. But he knew entrepreneurship wasn’t a surefire way to make money — in fact, his mother and stepfather shuttered their floral business three years after launching.

“The financial part was scary,” Vasquez Zuniga said. “I probably had enough savings to get me through four months, but I was also thinking about health insurance and how expensive that was.”

Vasquez Zuniga said it was essential to “get his ducks in a row” before starting his business. That meant talking to trusted friends and colleagues, doing thorough research, and leveraging publicly available resources from the Small Business Administration to craft a detailed business plan.

“Immediately when I decided to do this, my first phone calls were to a bookkeeper, a CPA, and a friend who’s a lawyer,” Vasquez Zuniga said.

He said completing rigorous research about product-market fit and business management is consequential to succeeding as an entrepreneur.

For example, he works with a mentoring program through Sacramento Valley Small Business Development Center.

“I can ask these kinds of questions where I’m trying to figure out a pricing model or trying to understand how I put a value to my hourly rate,” he said. “A lot of those things you can research but they’re not very clear, and it takes conversations.”

Additionally, Vasquez Zuniga was part of an entrepreneurial program through Immigrants Rising — a nonprofit organization that provides mentorship and business resources — that included courses on how to start a business and connected him with HR and legal experts.

Seeking advice from friends and colleagues can lead to business opportunities

Vasquez Zuniga said that aspiring entrepreneurs should take time to talk honestly with trusted friends, colleagues, and advisors about their business ideas.

For example, a mentor advised Vasquez Zuniga not to undervalue himself or his work, and make sure he was earning what he should.

When he left his job at Lucas Public Affairs, Vasquez Zuniga said his bosses were supportive of his decision and helped him find contract work for Collective.

What’s more, these conversations can lead to finding clients.

“I joke sometimes that my job is lunch because I go to lunch with a lot of people in my network,” Vasquez Zuniga said. “Just to check in, let them know what I’m up to, try to figure out what they’re up to, and if there’s any way that I can help them, or if there’s any overlap, or if they’ve heard of any projects or people.”

Vasquez Zuniga also said he hasn’t shied away from offering pro-bono consulting work to establish his credibility with a potential client.

“We’re still very much at the infancy stages of marketing our own company, yet we have been able to make a lot of these connections through people in our network,” he said.

Vasquez Zuniga has another advantage: He’s a native Spanish speaker, and he said nearly all of the people he works with are bilingual.

“I think that has been a huge asset in the work that we do because we’re able to translate the work, communicate the work, and even work with a lot of our clients and help them shape a narrative not just in English, but also in Spanish,” Vasquez Zuniga said.

Vasquez Zuniga added that setting milestones is also key for new entrepreneurs.

“If you don’t have goals, you’re just kind of aiming at nothing, and that can make you feel stagnant and unhappy with the work that you’re doing,” he said.