Jaime ‘Jim’ Hernandez: The Long Road to the Top

<figure id="attachment_39952" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-39952" style="width: 225px" class="wp-caption alignright"><a href="http://laprensa-sandiego.org/sdncc058/" rel="attachment wp-att-39952"><img loading="lazy" src="http://laprensa-sandiego.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/SDNCC058-225x30…; alt="" width="225" height="300" class="size-medium wp-image-39952" srcset="https://dev-laprensa.pantheonsite.io/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/SDNCC05… 225w, https://dev-laprensa.pantheonsite.io/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/SDNCC05… 767w, https://dev-laprensa.pantheonsite.io/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/SDNCC05… 1822w" sizes="(max-width: 225px) 100vw, 225px"></a><figcaption id="caption-attachment-39952" class="wp-caption-text">Jaime ‘Jim’ Hernandez</figcaption></figure>
Born in Saskatchewan, Canada, Jaime “Jim” Hernandez, President of Strategic Business Communications, Inc. (SBC), has a very peculiar family history, one which spans the globe.
“My dad is from Madrid, Spain and my grandparents on my mother’s side, the Jimenez family, were born in or around Manila in the Philippines,” Hernandez shared. My mom was born in China but raised in Hong Kong; she was a Jimenez that was born in China. All in all, my family was born on three continents.” 
An entrepreneurial spirit is also part of Hernandez’s family history.
“My grandfather had a business in China. He exported animal intestines to Spain to make chorizo, that was the family business,” Hernandez told La Prensa San Diego during a one-on-one interview. 
With a family history like this one, it is not surprising to know that on his road to becoming the President of SCB, Hernandez had the opportunity to work with over 30 different businesses, in 31 countries, on four continents in a variety of roles, ranging from speaker to market consultant. 
As president of SBC, Hernandez has a history of crafting results-driven marketing plans in many cultures. Hernandez has also been responsible for a wide variety of company tasks, from management, to helping develop their clientele’s growth throughout the world.
But while Hernandez now sits atop a company he now owns, he began his career as a car salesman.
“A lot of my career has been car sales. I started out as a salesman for Ford Credit and after that I got manager roles in car dealerships” Hernandez said. “I was sales manager for the largest Ford dealer in West Canada and was very close to immigrant communities, often doing business with people from all over Latin America, and in seven languages.”
“People often seeked me out since Spanish was not very common in Vancouver at the time but one of my strengths was my ability to change cultures to work with whomever we did business with,” Hernandez added.
 Hernandez left the sales world to make his way up SBC’s company ladder. His ascent started in 1996, when he and his wife began driving a loaded van from Washington State down to San Diego County. 
“I crossed the border from Canada into the United States on March 30, 1996,” Hernandez remembered. “My wife and I had a net worth of zero dollars at the time. All we had was a truck full of furniture and and a good education. We drove 29 hours non-stop from Bellingham, Washington until we got to Rancho Bernardo.” 
Hernandez originally came down to San Diego to work for SBC on a six-month contract. Based on his performance he was offered another six-month tenure at SBC and was subsequently brought in as a permanent employee. However, being just an employee wasn’t enough for him. 
“I eventually asked if [management] ever considered a partnership. At the time I was also doing contract work for other people mostly in the U.S. and other English speaking countries”, Hernandez recalled. “But then I went on to do work in Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Chile.”
Working in new environments and countries was a great change of scenery, and a timely one as well given that in the mid 1990s the introduction of financing and credit to many Latin American countries completely changed the business sector in which he was active in. 
During this time, Hernandez delivered management seminars, primarily around topics such as improving sales performance and refining the sales process to automotive distributors and suppliers. Hernandez was also doing more research on automotive related topics, specifically used car sales, culturally oriented focus groups, customer satisfaction and how to better collect feedback, among other relevant topics.
Nowadays as president, the tasks that take up a lot of Hernandez’s time haven’t changed much. However, company growth has taken a more central role. 
“We are always working on growing. As a result, we have built over two other departments in Latin America, where it is very difficult to get consumer data,” Hernandez explained. “So we built online tools where people can confidentially tell us who they are and online research tools where people from all over can give us data and can provide demographics, that is data that you could not buy years ago, and still cannot get in some countries like you can for consumers in the United States.”
“I was told this could not be done in the early 2000s but we were able to do it eventually,” Hernandez states. 
Despite having his hands full with his business, Hernandez still finds time to give back to the community.
Hernandez has been a member of the the Kiwanis Club for over 30 years, currently serves as the chair of his church’s finance committee, is currently the president of the Executives Association of San Diego. Hernandez also holds two events pro bono for organizations in town through his company.