Photo by Alec Schwartzman. Andres Moreno did not just happen upon success. It took the Venezuelan entrepreneur years of hard work and a bit of luck to create Open English, the leading online language school in more than 20 countries. “Ideas are not worth much, unfortunately, unless there is a lot of execution put behind them,” Moreno said Tuesday at The Idea Center at Miami Dade College. “That is a tough thing for people to understand. A lot of entrepreneurs are frustrated because they have a lot of great ideas coming to them all the time, but until they actually decide to take the first step, they won’t become great businesses.” Moreno spoke as part of his “Exito! con Andres Moreno” series. This appearance marks the first “Exito” (Spanish for success) event in the United States, previously only occurring in Latin America and South America. The two-hour talk was a precursor to a future full-day conference, although the date hasn’t been set. “People want these tools; they want to hear these experiences,” Moreno said. “I started doing speaking engagements around this concept, but soon realized speaking engagements just were not enough. We wanted to organize 10 years’ worth of experiences and lessons learned into a methodology that would allow people to have a toolbox they could apply wherever they were in their stage of development. That is how ‘Exito!’ was born.” In his talk, Moreno focused on the seven steps of building a business, using his story with Open English as a case study. According to him, a business starts with an idea. The idea then must become a product, which leads to targeting a market, understanding the competition, creating a business model, acquiring customers and raising capital. “All businesses are obviously different, but there is a common, shared set of challenges that you just need to get right when starting one,” Moreno said. “When you have a company at such a young stage, it is like a baby. Anything can hurt it. Anything can damage it. You have to be very protective … You realize a lot of stuff is out of your control.” Moreno learned the hard way that one of the main things a budding company cannot control is funding. In the early days of Open English, the company was on the verge of closing down and survived because of a chance loan of about $8,000 from a bank in Venezuela, Moreno said. Since then, the company has raised more than $120 million in venture capital funding. Open English employs 1,500 workers, and has 70,000 students enrolled.
