K
Kathleen Martin
Guest
inda Alvarado wends her way, politician-style, to her seat at Major League Baseball’s 2021 All-Star Game, pausing to hug or chat up everyone from Roy working the concession booth to Colorado Rockies CFO Hal Roth. As a pregame tribute to Hank Aaron begins, she pulls up on her phone a photo of herself with the late Hall of Fame slugger. “Baseball is in my blood,” she declares. Dressed in a purple suit that matches the Rockies’ dominant uniform color, Alvarado is more than just another uberfan. At the request of Colorado’s then-governor, Roy Romer, she became part of the team’s original investor group in 1991. Her stake was a tiny 1%, but significant: She was the first Latino owner in MLB, and the first self-made female owner. “It wasn’t my husband,” she says. “It was me. My money.”
Since that time, Alvarado’s influence—and money—have only grown. Today, her touch can be seen all over Denver. Her wholly owned Alvarado Construction has had a hand in building the city’s Mile High Stadium, the arena where the Denver Nuggets play and Denver International Airport, among other landmarks. It has also built most of the 258 Yum! Brands restaurants (Taco Bells, Pizza Huts and KFCs) operated by Palo Alto Inc., a franchise company owned 51% by Alvarado and 49% by her husband, Robert. It’s that last business that accounts for most of her $230 million fortune, which makes her one of the nation’s 100 richest self-made women.
Alvarado says she has succeeded by not being distracted by “conventional thinking.” That’s what has led her to experiment with a series of innovations, including a new Taco Bell design for tight urban spaces that puts the kitchen on the second floor, with a conveyor belt system robotically loading trays and delivering them to the floor below.
Alvarado’s backstory is anything but conventional. She started life in 1951 as Linda Martinez in a two-room adobe house outside Albuquerque, New Mexico; it had no running water except when it flooded every summer. “I thought everyone went to the Red Cross for summer vacation,’’ she quips.
Alvarado’s parents were builders by nature. Her father, a Protestant minister from Mexico who worked security at Sandia National Laboratory, had built that adobe house himself. Her mother would often recite, almost as a mantra: “Empieza pequeño, pero piensa muy grande” (start small, but think very big).
Rarer than their immigrant drive was the Martinezes’ determination to spare their daughter from “women’s” household chores so she could focus on academics. As the youngest of six siblings, and the only girl, Alvarado was expected to play sports with her brothers. “You got six kids, you got a team,’’ her father would say. When a high school coach told Alvarado that girls couldn’t compete in the high jump, her mother went to school to demand change. Alvarado won the high jump and the Girl Athlete of the Year award—a tribute to her performance in many sports, including softball.
Such physicality led Alvarado to take what turned out to be a crucial step toward a construction career: While studying economics on scholarship at Pomona College in California, she rejected an administrator’s suggestion that she work in the library or cafeteria and asked to join the grounds crew instead. She says she explained her choice this way: “I don’t have to wear these painful girl shoes. . . . I’m gonna get a tan, and you’ll pay me to work with all these single men.’’
The groundskeeping experience opened the door for Alvarado to land a job at a Los Angeles construction management company after she graduated in 1973. That, and a little subterfuge—she figures she got an interview because she used only her initials on the application, disguising her gender. It’s a method she’d use later when signing construction bids.
Continue reading: https://www.forbes.com/sites/mariaabreu/2021/10/01/how-linda-alvarado-went-from-manual-labor-to-becoming-one-of-americas-richest-self-made-women-construction-magnate-taco-bell-franchisee
Since that time, Alvarado’s influence—and money—have only grown. Today, her touch can be seen all over Denver. Her wholly owned Alvarado Construction has had a hand in building the city’s Mile High Stadium, the arena where the Denver Nuggets play and Denver International Airport, among other landmarks. It has also built most of the 258 Yum! Brands restaurants (Taco Bells, Pizza Huts and KFCs) operated by Palo Alto Inc., a franchise company owned 51% by Alvarado and 49% by her husband, Robert. It’s that last business that accounts for most of her $230 million fortune, which makes her one of the nation’s 100 richest self-made women.
Alvarado says she has succeeded by not being distracted by “conventional thinking.” That’s what has led her to experiment with a series of innovations, including a new Taco Bell design for tight urban spaces that puts the kitchen on the second floor, with a conveyor belt system robotically loading trays and delivering them to the floor below.
Alvarado’s backstory is anything but conventional. She started life in 1951 as Linda Martinez in a two-room adobe house outside Albuquerque, New Mexico; it had no running water except when it flooded every summer. “I thought everyone went to the Red Cross for summer vacation,’’ she quips.
Alvarado’s parents were builders by nature. Her father, a Protestant minister from Mexico who worked security at Sandia National Laboratory, had built that adobe house himself. Her mother would often recite, almost as a mantra: “Empieza pequeño, pero piensa muy grande” (start small, but think very big).
Rarer than their immigrant drive was the Martinezes’ determination to spare their daughter from “women’s” household chores so she could focus on academics. As the youngest of six siblings, and the only girl, Alvarado was expected to play sports with her brothers. “You got six kids, you got a team,’’ her father would say. When a high school coach told Alvarado that girls couldn’t compete in the high jump, her mother went to school to demand change. Alvarado won the high jump and the Girl Athlete of the Year award—a tribute to her performance in many sports, including softball.
Such physicality led Alvarado to take what turned out to be a crucial step toward a construction career: While studying economics on scholarship at Pomona College in California, she rejected an administrator’s suggestion that she work in the library or cafeteria and asked to join the grounds crew instead. She says she explained her choice this way: “I don’t have to wear these painful girl shoes. . . . I’m gonna get a tan, and you’ll pay me to work with all these single men.’’
The groundskeeping experience opened the door for Alvarado to land a job at a Los Angeles construction management company after she graduated in 1973. That, and a little subterfuge—she figures she got an interview because she used only her initials on the application, disguising her gender. It’s a method she’d use later when signing construction bids.
Continue reading: https://www.forbes.com/sites/mariaabreu/2021/10/01/how-linda-alvarado-went-from-manual-labor-to-becoming-one-of-americas-richest-self-made-women-construction-magnate-taco-bell-franchisee
