Some people have a knack for meeting people and connecting them to broker partnerships and alliances. Jesse Torres is one of those people.
He’s the owner of ArroyoWest, a California-based economic and workforce development agency, and Small Business Front, a consultancy targeted at providing small businesses with resources to start, grow, and scale. But his career didn’t start with entrepreneurship.
It started with what was supposed to be his first job at a local Los Angeles newspaper. When that job fell through due to a merger, it set Jesse on a career ladder that included rungs in academia, government, private practice, publicly traded companies, and even non-profits.
As he continued climbing that ladder to his latest role as an entrepreneur, his vast network and experience in disaster relief aligned when the COVID-19 pandemic happened.
This scale tale originally aired on our sister show, the Business Infrastructure Podcast, on the heels of the COVID-19 pandemic. Jesse is from and still lives in the Los Angeles, California area – an area that recently lost 40,000 acres of land due to an unprecedented series of wildfires. Keep this in mind as you listen to Jesse’s story.
In this episode, you will learn how Jesse leveraged his network to connect some of his local government clients to form a new organization that provided personal protective equipment (PPE) to tens of thousands of small businesses in California.
Pay close attention as he describes the business infrastructure quickly deployed to bring together the right people, processes, and tools that made this mass distribution of PPE possible.
We dedicate this episode to the resilient individuals behind the businesses destroyed by the January 2025 California wildfires and to the memory of those who lost their lives.
