Terry Beltrán, an entrepreneur in the greater Detroit area, has decades of success under her belt. In addition to holding marketing roles at several major Fortune 500 companies, she also launched two businesses as a solopreneur. Vista Latinos helps brands target Hispanic audiences; Beltrán Media provides marketing expertise to Hispanic-owned small businesses. To help the next generation, Beltrán decided to create a mentorship app called Ask the Latina, which connects Latina professionals to Latina students hoping to start careers in STEM and law. As Beltrán points out, Latinas are underrepresented in those fields. “I felt like that needed to change,” she says. And although Beltrán runs two thriving media and marketing companies, she turned to Verizon Small Business Digital Ready to gain valuable skills she needed to create the app. A one-on-one session with a Verizon Small Business Digital Ready finance expert helped Beltrán realize that launching the Ask the Latina app would necessarily be different from her other ventures. Her businesses are service-oriented, and after the finance session, Beltrán realized, “This was a totally different area … I’m going in and developing a product this time, not a service.” A financial structures course helped her create a new business model for the app, and additional self-paced and live courses helped her hone her social media strategy to target mentors and younger mentees. Beltrán found that Verizon Small Business Digital Ready offered new learnings she could apply to all three of her current ventures. “It’s actually great for anybody in any stage of their career, any stage of their business, whether they’re startup or further down the line,” Beltrán says. “[T]here’s something in there for no matter what stage you’re in." Verizon Small Business Digital Ready is part of Verizon’s goal to support 1 million small businesses by 2030 with the resources to thrive in the digital economy. Visit CitizenVerizon.com to learn more about the company’s responsible business efforts. To sign up for Verizon Small Business Digital Ready, visit digitalready.verizonwireless.com. An individual user's experience may vary and results are not guaranteed.

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