José Hernandez had done it all, from working in restaurants to cleaning windows, while his wife Mayra Diaz worked in the business sector. Both dreamed of owning their own business, yet felt “a little lost,” Diaz explains. 

Shortly after founding Sunrise Window Washing in 2015, they went to the Scottsdale Public Library in search of books about entrepreneurship. The librarian told them, “As a matter of fact, they’re starting a class upstairs” that same day.

The class, facilitated by the Ready Set Go Foundation (RSGF), was designed to help minorities, women and veterans get their businesses off the ground. After an attorney’s presentation, the first thing the Scottsdale couple did was change Sunrise from a sole proprietorship to an LLC for tax and liability reasons.

“We always wanted to have our own business, we just needed a little more knowledge,” Diaz says.

The couple is just the type of people entrepreneur OD Harris created the foundation for. While there’s no shortage of business-related workshops in the Valley, he contends, most gloss over the basics.

“More people are engaged in what their brand looks like versus what it looks like from an infrastructure perspective,” explains Harris, who founded RSGF in 2014 after leaving the Army, only to find it difficult to readjust to civilian life. Since then, the foundation has grown to include chapters in Tulsa; Columbus, Ohio; Los Angeles and Lansing, Michigan; and has trained more than 2,000 people in marketing, financing and legal matters.

“A lot of people have a passion, but no sense of business,” Harris says. Without an understanding of how capital and other components work, “your business will collapse within one or two years.”