Dvance p raise for minding Their Own Business

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she migrated from Trinidad with Aida and Andy at ages four and 
nine years.
Working for Other People
Aida, Gina’s daughter, remembered that her mother “was doing some 
computer programming” after completing several courses at the com-
munity college. Several moves later, including a stint on unemploy-
ment, Gina was hired as an efficiency manager at King. It turned out, 
Aida explained, that Gina eventually became “unhappy and I think she 
didn’t feel that her work was appreciated.” Gina was following a pat-
tern that she had established for herself in Trinidad: once she put her 
best into a working situation she realized that she could be successful 
and that she really needed to work for her own benefit. Aida expressed 
this point of view about her mother in her recollection that she thought 
that Gina “felt that working that hard she should be working for her-
self. Because she would always say to me that I work for Houston, it’s a 
restaurant chain, and … if you are putting all that time into something, 
it should be something for you.”
The King company afforded Gina the opportunity to learn about 
management and make contacts in the city where she worked. Gina 
explained how her knowledge of programming “put me in a unique 
position and moved [me] up very quickly through the organization 
because I can talk the language on the client’s side and on the tech 
side.” Her expertise in programming led her to opportunities where 
she was “accompanying managers to meetings where I can sort of talk 
the client lingo” and because of her “personality, because I am so easy to 
get along” with others, she was introduced to a lot of influential people 
in important places. This chapter in Gina’s evolution seemed “exciting 
and different” and she enjoyed it at the time since it also involved a lot 
of traveling. She was in a new country, in a new city, and she was learn-
ing how to do business under a different set of rules for twelve years. 
Her final position in that programming industry was called a project 
management director for all the federal branches in its network.

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minding
their
own
business
Five years as a project manager for the King company taught Gina 
a lot of things that have helped her to manage her own business suc-
cessfully. As she reflected on those years of upward mobility she listed 
the outstanding job ratings that she garnered, the understanding about 
“the projects, the managers, putting the programs in place,” and what 
techniques were necessary to run a successful business. What she had 
done intuitively in her restaurants in Trinidad in order to be a good 
steward of the business investments, she explained that she learned 
“the academics” behind her strategies. She became aware about the 
fact that she had “sat in the classroom of life” and explained her under-
standing in this example:
If you have an algorithm, and you don’t apply it … to a problem, you get 
the wrong solution. So it’s not just knowing the process, but how to apply 
it, where to apply it, what is appropriate to be applied, and all of that. I was 
able to get [it] under my belt in those years in sort [of] preparation, and again 
learning, becoming literate without having sat in that classroom.
Andy smiled when he explained that Gina “decided to leave corpo-
rate America, … [and] when she turned in her letter of resignation the 
front office called personally and said, ‘How can we get you to stay?’” 
Although the company offered Gina “a huge raise” in salary, the entre-
preneur was “able to look at that, which would have been a lot of fruit 
of her labor … and say, ‘I can’t take that, there is something greater for 
me out there.’”
The Ice Cream Days
Andy believes that Island Caterers was born on Bob Marley day in 
Washington, D.C. in the year of 1993. Andy, Aida, and Gina got a vend-
ing permit to sell ice cream. The machine broke down so they did not 
have any way of keeping their goods cold, Andy recalled that “we sat 
out there with gallons of ice cream melting, and that was the only thing 
that we had, that shut us down for business that day.” The enterprising 
family decided that the next time they came out to sell in public, they 

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