Empresas Polar and its “1,000 Companies” program open a new horizon in Venezuela

Lorenzo Mendoza, a businessman with decades of experience, has just unveiled what I consider the most revolutionary idea for the Venezuelan market in recent years: the “1,000 Companies” program, which seeks to launch one thousand new businesses over the next 15 years. That the proposal comes from the chairman of Empresas Polar, the country's best-known company, is no minor detail. It means he is trying to tell us something.

The program has three tracks, each with a different focus, through which thousands of young people can be taught how to start a business. Training, led by Mendoza and other Polar executives, shows them what it really takes to build a business and a brand of their own. Seed capital, which does not require them to give up shares, gives them the chance to put an idea into practice. The supplier track teaches them something no classroom can: what it is like to work with a large and demanding customer.

I think the most valuable element lies in what those who are just starting out receive. In Venezuela only two in every hundred ventures survive, according to El Estímulo, and almost no one starts with a loan or with someone to show them how to keep the books. Having that support can allow a business to move from merely surviving to growing over time.

As the next generation, we have far more opportunities than those who came before us, who for years saw emigration as the most obvious way out. Today we are young people hungry to get ahead in a country as rich in resources as Venezuela. This program represents quality jobs and a concrete reason to stay, but opportunity alone is not enough: we must take the lead in what happens to our future.

I feel this initiative is a huge contribution to the economy and to the country. No one designs a plan of this magnitude over 15 years unless they believe Venezuela is going to change in earnest. That, in my view, is Mendoza's message: that change has already begun and that the private sector wants to help build it.