Mi Casa Es Su Casa

Let me tell you about two meetings I sat in on.

Several months ago I gave a seminar to a group of CEO’s of homebuilder corporations. Somewhere in the middle of the discussion, I asked them a simple question: “Which company in your industry owns the Asian space?” Dead silence. Huh?

“Well,” I reasoned, “it would seem to me that if I were building homes, I would want to get connected with the fastest-growing affluent population in the U.S. I’d sure want to understand the principles of feng shui, and I’d sure want to know the differences between what Indonesians, Thais, and Chinese expect from their homes.”

I then dropped the next question. “Which company in your industry owns the Hispanic space?” Again, dead silence.

I continued: “It would seem to me that if I were building homes, I would want to get connected with the fastest growing demographic, period, in the U.S., and I’d sure want to know the differences between what Mexicans, Puerto Ricans and Cubans expect from their homes. At 42 million, Hispanics are now the largest minority group in the U.S. So how many of you are learning Spanish, and having your front-line people learn Spanish, and marketing your services through Spanish distribution and sales channels?” Silence.

The reality is that in the U.S., Hispanics and Asians are growing more than 10 times the rate of non-Hispanic whites, yet, lip service to diversity notwithstanding, our marketing approaches often seem to assume a monolithic, homogeneous market. No longer true. The public school system in Los Angeles County alone deals with 140 languages in the classrooms.

Spanish, of course, is huge, so much so that nuestra casa es su casa; our house is becoming their house. It’s not simply that the Hispanic population in the U.S. has doubled in size since 1980. It’s that the younger the age group, the more Hispanic it is. The Pew Hispanic Center reports that three out of five Americans under 40 are non-Hispanic white, while four out of five Americans over 40 are non-Hispanic white. Customers are no longer just the white-bread “Leave It to Beaver” variety.

Nor are employees, which brings me to my second meeting. Last week I met for two days with the officers of a national roofing association. Here’s what I learned: In the roofing industry, 40-80% of employees are now Hispanic. The higher numbers are in California and the Southwest, the lower numbers are in the South. But the numbers continue to rise, whether in Wisconsin, Georgia, or California. These Latino employees work very hard at work that is very hard. They’re proud to be roofers, an increasing number advance to supervisory and management positions, and many achieve the American dream. The biggest operational problem facing the roofing companies (most of which are small and privately held) is finding enough immigrants to do the work, since gringos tend to shy away from it.

I don’t want to get into the emotional political minefield of immigration debate, but I do want to mention how impressed I was that the officers of this association—all no-nonsense roofing contractors— focused hard on issues like building cultural sensitivity, improving their Spanish skills, providing employees with English as second language training, providing employees with ongoing technical training and management development in Spanish, and translating all corporate and technical documents into Spanish. They weren’t doing this to “celebrate diversity”, they were doing this to build their businesses. I think a lot of us will be doing the same in the very near future.