Ricardo Cabrera, the operations manager for the Latino Chamber of Commerce of Boulder County, or LCCBC, feels fortunate that, throughout his life, he has landed in the right places and met the right people at the right time, he said.
Cabrera’s roots are in Mexico City, where he was born and raised until his junior year of high school when his family moved to the United States. After high school, Cabrera attended the University of Utah where he received a bachelor’s degree in computer science.
In 1991, Cabrera found himself working as a coder for a medical imaging company in Boulder, Colorado. After only three years, Cabrera had become the company’s product expert and, as a result, he was sent to live in Munich, Germany in 1994, where he taught Germans in the same field about a 3D ultrasound medical imaging system and learned about their technologies.
Upon his return to Colorado, young Cabrera relocated from Boulder to Lafayette, where he bought his first home. Despite this milestone, Cabrera’s position at the medical imaging company led him to travel all over North and South Americas for years, installing the company’s system and training foreign doctors how to use it.
“I was country hopping then,” Cabrera said, “I would go from Brazil to Argentina to Chile, come back home for a few days, then go to Columbia or Mexico or Canada.”
After a few years, feeling burnt out from the constant travel and the series of mergers the company had undergone, Cabrera left his job to start his own business creating and selling a 3D ultrasound medical imaging system specifically for baby faces. At the same time, Cabrera was enrolled in online classes, from which he ultimately obtained his masters degree in business administration with a global management focus.
When the market dried up for his business in 2003, however, Cabrera decided to take a sabbatical year from working – the first of what would become a decennial tradition.
“My first sabbatical was such a great, life-changing experience,” Cabrera said, “so I promised myself I would take a year off for every ten years of work. I recommend that to anybody and everybody – if you plan it, you can make it work – because it’s the best thing you’ll do in your life.”
During his first sabbatical year, Cabrera, inspired by his love for golf, worked as a golf professional at a local golf course. Afterward, he returned to work for ten years, acting as a distribution manager for a food company in the first half of the decade and, later, in another position within the medical technology field. When the opportunity to take a second sabbatical year came up in 2017, Cabrera returned to the golf course – at which point, he was asked to be the assistant coach for Lafayette High School’s golf team, he said. Since then, Cabrera has been promoted to head coach, a position he still holds today.
In 2017, Cabrera also decided to undergo the process toward fulfilling another one of his passions – real estate. By the beginning 2018, he had acquired his real estate license and set off to work in the field.
Between his jobs in real estate and as a high school golf coach, Cabrera began “really getting to know the community,” he said.
Cabrera’s journey to get to know his community came to a head in 2019 when he attended Longmont Startup Week for the first time. There, drawing upon another of his interests, Cabrera spread the word about the Hispanic Wealth Project, or HWP, an organization committed to “building dialogue around issues affecting the creation and retention of wealth for Hispanic households,” the HWP website states.
“I’m really interested in helping individuals create wealth by saving and investing for the future, so I became a part of the Hispanic Wealth Project,” Cabrera said. “I never really made that much money on a salary but I was able to generate enough to say, ‘okay, I’ll be comfortable when I retire.’ It’s not that hard to do if you know what you’re doing.”
Cabrera is passionate about helping people prosper personally and financially, he said, which he does by spreading his knowledge on topics related to wealth creation and wealth management. According to Cabrera, his goal is to share his advice with at least 400 people per year.
At Longmont Startup Week, Cabrera talked about this passion and HWP’s mission with many people including, unbeknownst to him at the time, several members of LCCBC.
Then, in May of 2019, “I was invited to this meeting and I had no idea what was going on,” Cabrera said with a laugh. The meeting turned out to be an LCCBC yearly meeting where the organization’s transfers of power were decided.
“I walked into the meeting feeling curious and I walked out being on the (LCCBC) board and the (organization’s) treasurer,” Cabrera said. “It turns out that my past experiences in international business administration and opening and creating startups for other people gave me the right experience and know-how to be able to do it all over again.”
At the time, according to Cabrera, LCBCC’s business model was in need of a reboot. Throughout the time he’s been with LCCBC, Cabrera said, “we’ve reinvented ourselves and reconciled a lot of things. We brought (LCCBC) up to date and, as a result, we’ve started being recognized again.”
In April of 2020, Cabrera became the first operations manager of LCBBC. At the end of this month, however, Cabrera will step down from this position as the organization seeks an individual who will be able to fulfill the position full time as opposed to part time.
“It’s been a great experience,” Cabrera said. “It’s wonderful that (LCCBC) can look for a full time person and that they have the need for a full time person — it shows that all the work this group has done up until today has flourished. (LCCBC) has created a really great chamber that services the community as it should. I’m proud to have been a part of this group and I hope to be a part of it in one way or another in the future.”
Specifically, Cabrera commemorates the LCCBC’s Longmont partners — city of Longmont, Longmont Chamber, Longmont Economic Development Partnership, Longmont Downtown Development Authority and others — for helping LCCBC become what it is today, he said.
“Working with the Longmont groups has been a breath of fresh air. They are capable people, their energy is positive and their focus is very forward-looking and modern. It’s been awesome and wonderful to work within Longmont because it’s so different from all the other cities I’ve been involved in.”
Although Cabrera’s plans for the future aren’t set in stone, he will most likely dedicate his time to furthering HWP’s mission while also continuing his career in real estate, he said.
Whatever the future brings, “I hope to help the community,” Cabrera said. “Everything I do is geared towards helping the public.”
