Beto Yarce’s journey to becoming the acting director of our office is rooted in small business ownership. Beto started his own business, Cintli, with $250 and a six-foot table. He made jewelry and sold Mexican folk art at famers markets and festivals around Seattle.
The idea to grow his business by opening a shop in Seattle’s Pike Place Market took hold in 2003. Beto was eating at Crepe de France with a friend.
“I told my friend I’m going to open a store here. I just love the market,” he said. “My friend told me I’m crazy and asked, ‘how are you going to open a store here? The market is probably very hard to access.’ I just said I’ll figure it out.”
And he did. After lunch, Beto went down to the Pike Place Market Preservation and Development Authority office and looked at open spaces. He found a space and went to work. Beto acquired all the necessary documents but he couldn’t access capital for opening his shop due to his immigration status.
“At that time, I was undocumented so I didn’t qualify for access to capital,” he explained. “I fundraised my own money as a waiter and created a lending circle with my friends.”
He opened Cintli in space 328 in June 2004 with just $10,000. Given the location of the shop in what he calls “the last part of the market,” Beto worked to make sure Cintli was a destination shop. He continued to sell at farmers markets and festivals and focused on marketing. He says this is why he appreciates technical assistance for small businesses.
“It’s so important to small businesses to figure out the business model, how you are going to bring traffic,” he said.
Beto operated Cintli in space 328 for four years. He says that’s when the 2008 recession started taking a toll on the economy and the Market started doing construction, impacting the area around his shop. They told Beto he had two weeks to relocate or close his business for three months.
“I was very terrified. I was wondering how am I going to make sales? The economy is down and I’m not selling as much,” he said. “Then space 321 was available so I moved Cintli there.”
Space 321 was Cintli’s home for the next decade. Today, you can still see the Mexican folk art-inspired “321” on the front of the store and other remainders of Beto’s business that he sold to the current shop owner.
“It was a phenomenal time in the Market. We all supported each other. We were community, we were neighbors,” he said, noting that he’s still in touch with many of his “shop neighbors” from his time there.
Building on that sense of community, Beto decided he wanted to share what he’d learned with other aspiring business owners and founded the nonprofit Ventures. The program offered technical assistance, training, coaching, access to capital and incubation for business owners. Beto spent his time focused on serving underserved communities, BIPOC-, women-, LGBTQ+-, and minority-owned businesses and individuals with limited resources. Beto describes his clients as having “limited resources and unlimited potential.”
That grew into Ventures Marketplace, located in the Market. The retail incubator gives business owners with limited resources the opportunity to bring their product to market and test it.
“And we provide feedback on their marketing, their brands, what’s selling and what’s not,” Beto explained. “The goal is to have them build a clientele and hopefully they open their own store.”
Under Beto’s leadership, Ventures Marketplace was able to sell more than $1 million and use the profits to run the store and subsidize grants for the program. He left the organization in 2022, but it is still operating today.
Though he closed Cintli in 2017, Beto says his experience informed his work when he was appointed by former President Joe Biden to serve as Regional Administrator for the U.S. Small Business Administration’s Region 10, where he supported more than 1.3 million small businesses through expanded access to capital, counseling, and federal contracting opportunities. Now, it’s informing his new role at our office because he understands the challenges small business owners face.
“My time at Pike Place Market connected me to a sense of community and grassroots organizers, people who care about each other and want our city and region to be better,” he said. “I care about my community and my city, and I want to make it better. That’s why I’m doing this work.”