Entrepreneurs: Legacy of Dreams

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Changing attitudes toward money have allowed the next generations to update and expand their companies. Early immigrants, suspicious of and unable to secure standard loans, turned to community loan clubs, in which relatives and friends put up money to help start businesses. This financing method is common but limited. What Koreans call kye is a hui for the Chinese, ekub for Ethiopians, san for Dominicans. Today, says Steven Gold, a sociologist at Michigan State University, immigrant businesses have access to loans from other ethnic sources, including banks or investors that cater to their community. The younger generation is also far savvier about landing tax-advantaged loans from the Small Business Administration and various minority-business-development funds. Some companies, including the Korean-owned clothing retailer Forever 21, are planning to go public.

Koreans arriving in the 1970s specialized in apparel manufacturing for some of the same reasons Indian immigrants gravitated toward the hotel industry: those businesses let them use family members as staff, conduct transactions in cash and get by with minimal English or experience. The Patel family's entry into the hotel business is exceedingly typical, right down to their surname. Natu Patel, a banana farmer in the Gujarat region of India--where most of the U.S.'s Indian hoteliers have roots and the majority of residents are named Patel--arrived in San Francisco nearly three decades ago with his family and $10. He learned the business working for motels owned by wife Hansa's relatives and then sought out affordable properties in remote regions before settling on a small inn in Cleveland, Tenn., later adding motels in Waco, Texas, and Kennesaw, Ga.

Priti Patel, 33, hardly remembers another life. At 8, she was counting change and working the front desk. "I used to hate it," she says. "Everybody else gets to go home after school and get a snack. I had to help at the hotel. On weekends I had to cut grass." When friends drove by and saw her working, she would feel embarrassed. Still, the industry intrigued her enough to pursue a business degree at the University of Tennessee, and afterward she worked for the Small Business Administration. She returned to the family's HNP Enterprises to take over as manager of the Kennesaw motel in 1997.

Patel's management style differs from that of her parents. For one thing, she refuses to live on property, choosing instead to separate her work life from her family. Unlike her parents, who prefer to do the work themselves, she employs a housekeeping manager, a desk manager and a sales manager to oversee the property in her place. "I let go a lot more than my dad does," she says. Patel and her brother Hitesh, 25, plan to expand into restaurant franchises. Though their methods and goals may differ, says Patel, their father is proud of their achievements. "That's why he sent us to school."