From Bogota To Washington DC: Inside-Out Business And Leadership Transformations With Angela Franco

 

We are all on an ever-going journey of self-transformation. Angela Franco has been transforming herself from the inside-out along with the communities she has been a part of. Throughout her journey, she found herself constantly being guided by her passion for helping others. This passion took her from Bogota to Washington, DC, where she is now the President and CEO of the DC Chamber of Commerce. In this episode, Angela shares with us her inspiring journey of not only self-transformation but also transforming businesses and leadership. She talks about her work and how she brings and lifts others up along with her, especially those minorities, to grow, connect, and attract opportunities. Through it all, Angela shows that true transformations come from the self. Only by doing this does success and the impact you wish to create happen. Join today’s conversation and discover transformation from the inside-out.

—

Listen to the podcast here

 

From Bogota To Washington DC: Inside-Out Business And Leadership Transformations With Angela Franco

With us, we have Angela Franco who is the President and CEO of the DC Chamber of Commerce. An experienced business leader, Angela has strengthened and revitalized organizations including the DC Health Benefit Exchange Authority and the Greater Washington Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. Before relocating to the US, Franco held management positions in Bogota, Colombia. She was recognized with the 2021 Washington Business Journal’s Women Who Mean Business Award. She’s also a certified life coach and a speaker. 

—

Welcome, Angela. It’s so good to have you with us. I feel like you started your leadership entrepreneurial journey very early on. When you were eleven, as you were sharing in our little check-in, you had your own jewelry business, and then you kept moving from there. We’d love to get a little bit about your story and how you transformed as a leader. From Bogota to Washington, DC, you’ve been transforming yourself inside out and the communities that you’re a part of. What moves you in what you do?     Thank you so much for inviting me and for giving me the opportunity to share my story with the purpose that this would help somebody else build their own. I am from Columbia. I was born in California. I grew up in Colombia in a big family of six siblings and my parents. I always wanted to have my own money. That’s what moved me at the beginning. I wanted to have that independence. When I look back, that’s really what moved me at that point. I wanted to have independence, to be on my own, and to be able to pay for my things. When I was eleven, I started a jewelry business. My father would invest in me buying the jewelry and then I’ll pay him back. I will save and then I will buy more. Your clients start being your inner circle, like your family, grandmother, aunts, and cousins, and then you expand from there. That gave me a lot of a sense of family and safety that I knew I could count on them since then. I went to an only-girls school. I started business administration. After I finished university, I moved for the first time to the United States. I lived in Miami and Puerto Rico, and then I went back. When I went back, I had a very difficult experience. I started to feel like I had an emptiness in my soul. When you feel solid, you feel solid. It’s not about beauty. I always compare that with an empty bottle. When you have an empty bottle, you can move it easier. When you have a full bottle, it’s heavier. That’s what happens with the soul. That’s what I was feeling. I was feeling empty inside. I started to feel that need to transform and look for something else. I started a journey when I was 23 or 24 of self-development. I, later on, understood that that’s the way I grew up. My father was in the seminary for eighteen years. I grew up with the Jesuits. It’s a community that is very emotionally evolved in many ways. That’s what I grew up seeing and what I grew up hearing. The other thing is when you feel it in your inner self and you really say, “I need to do something for me.” I started a journey of transformation that was difficult. Every time you start a journey, it is confrontational. You need to confront your family, your upbringing, your friends, yourself, the dark sides of you, and the light sides of you. You need to start understanding what you’re about and what kind of leadership you bring to the table. I continued to work. Professionally, I did always very well. I loved it. I’ve always had a passion for helping. I like going above and beyond the call of duty. When I was 31, I was in this place where I had a great position in Colombia. It was a senior position in a pension fund, but I was not fulfilled. At that moment, interestingly enough, because that’s sometimes the way life works, without knowing, I got a call from a friend of mine asking me if I wanted to move to the United States. Since I had that prior experience, my first response was, “I’m not going to do that. It’s hard enough to move to another country. You know since you’re also from another country. It’s hard enough to move to another country.” Doing it that way as an immigrant is more difficult, but I ended up here. I moved and started from scratch again. It’s interesting because you started your journey at eleven years old with a network of support. You talked about the support your father gave you. You talked about the first customers that were, in fact, your family. It’s good that you came from a big family. You had more customers, which is great. It makes me think about the work you’ve done since being in the States, creating this leadership around the Chamber of Commerce, both the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce and the DC Chamber of Commerce. That model of support started back when you were doing jewelry. It’s interesting to me. I wonder if you can speak to the role of support when you jumped into saying yes to your friend to coming back to the States and the work that you’re doing.  It’s interesting you’re sharing that because I never looked at it that way. You always see everybody has a different perspective. I love it. When I moved, I started from scratch. I started as an intern again and it was not easy. The biggest lesson that all this has taught me is how difficult it is for an immigrant. In my case, I was fortunate enough that I had the language, the education, and the citizenship. Even with that, I experienced the hardships of an immigrant. That has given me a whole different perspective on how important it is to give that support, to have that support, and to build that community around you. As I go through this journey, I understand more and more the power of community and building that circle of support around you. It starts with you giving. It starts with you being the best self you can be. I never even expected that I was going to end up at the DC Chamber, the Hispanic Chamber, or anything because I always had that thing in the back of my head that I was going to be behind the scenes. The more you self-develop, the more you connect with your purpose and what you’re here for. After all these years, I’ve been connecting with that leadership that is not something that I have to go and say, “I’m a leader.” It is something that is within. In my mind, that’s the difference between when you see somebody and you say, “I really want to follow this person because it’s part of his or her DNA or whatever,” or somebody that claims to be without being. That has been my biggest lesson, connecting more with my sense of purpose, my sense of leadership that is here to transform and support, and the responsibility we have when we have opportunities to bring others up. What purpose does it have for us to be the most educated and have the money if we’re not sharing and we’re not bringing people with us? That’s what it really has developed. I have connected the most in the work I have done here. How do you see that mirrored in the work that you do with business not just from your perspective? You work with a lot of business organizations and support business leaders. How does that particular characteristic or those sets of characteristics show up in the success of the business or not? There are a couple of things that entrepreneurs are looking for all the time. It is access to contacts, opportunities, and capital. When you run a Chamber of Commerce, you’re in the middle. I always look at the Chamber of Commerce in the circle and then you have the government, corporations, business organizations, and organizations that certify businesses around you. Your responsibility is to make sure that you connect those businesses with opportunities. This country has a lot of great things. One of the greatest things is that there’s opportunity for everybody. There’s a space for everybody. There are a lot of opportunities for minority-owned businesses to grow and connect. There are certification opportunities and contracting opportunities. It’s a matter of giving them that education, connecting them with whoever can share the information with them, and putting them in front of those opportunities. Sometimes, we don’t know. Even somebody who was born here and grew up here, sometimes, they don’t have access to that information. That’s what we do. That’s what I feel that responsibility is. It is to make sure we educate, connect, elevate, inspire, and say, “You can do it as well.” You’re also a life coach. I don’t know where in this amazing adventure of your life that came in, but I wonder where and how it filters into the work you’re doing. I wanted to do life coaching, not so much to be a coach. As a coach, you support people all the time, but it was for me to have a little bit more formal understanding of processes and procedures and to understand a little more about the different models. The Newfield Network with Julio Olalla was a year of classes. I loved it. It has helped me always. The thing that I remember the most is the coaching model. If you keep doing the same thing, you’re going to get the same results. If you change, then you can have different results. How does change happen? It is within me. I always think that everything is very important when it comes to you, your development, and giving back to the community, but your self-knowledge, self-development, and taking ownership are key in leadership, having a successful life, living at peace, and keeping friendships. What’s your responsibility? What do you own in every situation?

  I love Newfield’s work. Their ontological model is shifting the being, which is very similar to the work Bonnie and I have been doing with coaching. A lot of the emphasis that we put is on that inner transformation, which is shifting the being. I’m curious about the work you are doing, but also personally, if you have a story or maybe businesses that you’ve been supporting or that you’ve witnessed. What happens when the leader transforms the self? How does it impact the work they’re doing in the community? If there’s any story or anything that comes up for you. There are so many stories. Every business or every business person has a purpose. Every entrepreneur has a reason to do things. The best ones I have met are those that have a purpose connected to their business. I always talk about conscious capitalism. That is that ability to make money, but being conscious of supporting their communities.  

The best ones are those that have a purpose connected to their business.

  There is one story that always comes back to me. It was years ago. They opened a company here to distribute organic chocolate, quinoa, and other products. They were produced by at least 1,000 families that got together in Bolivia. That was their source of income. They moved a person here and opened a company. They were able to get into Whole Foods and other stores with that determination and always keep in mind that whatever they do helps tons of families back home. They also had a couple of people here. Those are the stories that, for me, are so powerful because, at the end of the day, that’s what it’s about. How are you going to transform other people’s lives with what you do? What’s the impact you’re going to create with what you do? It’s all about impact. I wonder also how you see the role of the individual in creating that impact through maybe a story that you had from the work you did with the Chamber. You’ve been transforming places as you’ve moved from one place to the other. What’s your sense of your contribution or the way you’ve shown up in witnessing the impact and the transformation? That’s an interesting question because I’ve been thinking a lot about it, and more than thinking, feeling. I’m going to tell you how that revelation came to me and I’ll give you the answer in a moment. I was having dinner with a person. The person told me, “Do all leaders have something to say? What are you going to say?” I stayed with that thought. I was like, “What am I going to say?” I said, “I don’t have to say anything. I have to be.” That’s the difference between a person that says and a person that is. You create transformation. The more I go through life, the more clarity I have. You don’t have to say. You have to be. You have to be that change. Being is getting to a place where you transform yourself daily and where you show up at your best and that you are. If you confront a situation, you’re not going to scream. You’re going to handle it and say, “What’s happening here? Let’s explore the possibilities.” It doesn’t mean that we don’t make mistakes, especially in this role, I’ve made a lot of mistakes. At the end of the day, that’s where I come back to. It is like, “I don’t have to say anything. I have to be. I do the best thing I can every day and change will come.”     That requires practice. Bonnie, I know you’re about to jump. I don’t want to move us, but what sorts of practices keep you in that space of being? I pray every morning. I meditate. I walk at least 1 hour 4 times a week. I eat healthy. I keep my friends clean. Every day, I’m intentional about being connected with the Creator. I ask Him for guidance. The world we live in has a lot of noise. I know everybody says it, but it’s true. There’s a lot of noise. Sometimes, you have to isolate yourself, put everything in perspective, and say, “What’s happening here? Am I really heading in the right direction? Is there anything that I need to think about?” The more you develop your inner self, the more intuitive you become with your own reality and purpose.

  I know I’m speaking a lot of coaching terms as we do, but this is a perfect space to bring all these conversations up that go in a little more deepness than saying, “You have to do this or that.” Nobody has to do anything. I don’t have the right answers. I don’t know. You have to be. You have to be the best being you can be and have the right intentions in your heart. In those moments when you say guidance in this practice, the more you keep being your best or having those intentions that come from the heart, and you’re going to make mistakes, that’s how your intuition gets heightened. I wonder, what are those moments as you receive guidance and you move into action? How is that you know? What are those signs or felt senses that move you and say, “That’s it?” A person can come to my mind or a solution comes. For example, if I’m debating about doing something, I don’t do anything. Maybe a person comes to my mind and I’m like, “That’s the person I need to talk to,” or an answer will come. Listening to that is really what you have to do, in my mind. Sometimes, we don’t listen to it because we’re humans. When you sit down and say, “I’m not going to let the human being push me but I’m going to let the Lord tell me,” then everything falls better and works better. I have a question. In listening to your story, you speak this. Your answer was quick and said with great confidence and conviction of your connection with your inner self. I think about what you said at the beginning of your father’s spiritual experience and your time with the Jesuits. That preceded this time in the States and Puerto Rico when you felt you had a need for a down moment that you went to search again for meaning. You had another moment coming over to the States the second time that you said was really hard. I want to go back to that basic upbringing you had with your father and that instilled this confidence of listening inside. Can you speak to that a little bit? Yeah. First of all, I had an accident when I was six years old. I started remembering everything from that point on. I always think that those were awakening moments. My father was a self-made person. I always call him a self-made person. He got his education. He did a PhD in Education here in the United States. I believe he was the first one in his family to go to college. He did his PhD and dedicated his life to supporting others through education. The way he operated was very independent. It was not independent that was isolated from the world, but independent in the sense that he had a north. He was doing the right thing. If he had listened to a lot of the things growing in a country like Colombia to a lot of the people and maybe people saying, “You’re not going to make it because in Colombia, it’s difficult. You don’t have the class, the social class, the money, or whatever,” maybe he would not have gone anywhere. He made it and he got married very well. I always see when I’m going through difficult situations, I go back to how he acted in certain moments. That inspires me. He was like, “You never put your head down.” Even if I’m going through a difficult time, I have to get up and say, “I have to put my face up.” He was very independent that way. He didn’t allow outside forces to get to him. That was an internal fight he had. We never talked about this. I would’ve loved to have had the opportunity to talk to him about it. I’m sharing from what I saw, not what he had in his heart. I imagine that it was not easy for him either. He built a school. He opened a school when he was 62. That was his dream. He was 62 when he started. It is never too late in my mind to start. I have this little inkling that I really want to ask you about your mom. You said your father married well. I wondered about the role of your mom in your life. My mother was a strong woman. I come from a line of very strong women. She was a journalist. When the six of us were grown, she did a Master’s in Linguistics. I don’t know how she did that. She was the director of the Jesuits Magazine for 30 years. She was a great mom, dedicated to the children. She always said that she was going to be a mom. My father was into education and my mother was about looking good. I was not allowed to wear sweatpants on Sundays. Everybody wanted to, but I was not allowed. It was a good combination. It was different. Two worlds came together and it was interesting. We were very close, but we were not the kind of families that had friends all over. Those families that depend on their friends, we were not like that. We had family. The family would come, but it was our family. We were moving together to the next level. I operate a little that way. I have a lot of friends and family, but at the end of the day, it’s what I have to do with my life. My responsibility is with Angela, my son, and whatever first, and then I can go out and support everybody else. That’s a really strong grounding, too, to have, for lack of a better word, that self-care. You focus on the self and make sure that your needs and commitments are met. I’d like to have you maybe share as we close what are some of the things that are exciting you in what you’re doing. Are there any hopes, aspirations, or things that you’re moving more into?      I don’t know how to answer that question. With where my energy is, the first one is in giving my son the support he needs to grow up as a citizen of the world and then for me to continue my journey in that way. I am working every day on myself and doing the best I can every day. This 2023, the Chamber has challenged me on many fronts personally and professionally. It may be because I started working with a different group of people with a different dynamic. It is an organization that has been in the city for 85 years. I want to make sure that while I’m there and for the time I’m there, we continue to build something that can give continuity for another 85 years. That’s where I’m putting my energy. I have a small nonprofit that is called Latinas USA. We help Latino women have access to financial and emotional independence. We did a convention in September 2023. There were 600 Latino women. We do it in Spanish. It’s a very special space for women to connect, transform, and see what possibilities there are. I have a partner in the nonprofit. My partner is a clinical psychologist. I want to continue to support that effort moving forward. I’ve seen pictures from those events. There is a feeling of joy and love. You can feel it even from not being in the room but the witnessing of it. I know when I met you years ago, this was the thing that you kept talking about that really brought joy and moved you. I am so excited that this is continuing to grow. To have 600 women this September 2023, the lives that you can impact are tremendous. Thank you so much for spending a little time with us and sharing your story. Thank you very much for inviting me.  

Important Links

• DC Chamber of Commerce
• https://www.LinkedIn.com/in/Angela-Franco-2188a5/
• https://www.BizJournals.com/Washington/News/2021/09/17/Angela-Franco-DC-Chamber-of-Commerce.html
• https://www.DCPolicyCenter.org/people/Angela-Franco/

 

About Angela Franco

Angela Franco is the President & CEO of the DC Chamber of Commerce. Her commitment to support and advocate for Chamber members demonstrates passion and vision to grow the organization. Franco joined the DC Chamber of Commerce during civic unrest and a global pandemic and continues to move the organization forward. By working with its executive team and board of directors, Franco creates programs and services that position the Chamber as a valuable resource and leading advocate for businesses throughout DC. An experienced business leader, Franco has strengthened and revitalized organizations, including the DC Health Benefit Exchange Authority and the Greater Washington Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. Before relocating to the US, Franco held management positions in Bogotá, Colombia. Franco has received many prestigious honors. Most recently, she was recognized with the 2021 Washington Business Journal’s Women Who Mean Business Award. In addition, she is a Board Member at Large for the United Way of the National Capital Region and the Advisory Board of the Pan American Development Foundation, Board Member at Boys Scouts of America, and an appointee to the DC Workforce Investment Council (by the DC Mayor). Franco is a graduate of Leadership Montgomery and Leadership Greater Washington, She holds a Master of Science degree in Finance and a Bachelor of Arts degree in Business Administration. She is also a Certified Life Coach and a John Maxwell certified trainer, coach and speaker.