Alejandro Mendieta Blanco is one of the greatest entrepreneurs and philanthropists the world may have ever seen. Till today, we have only heard stories from other people that may or may not be the truth, but now, we bring to you excerpts from his true-life story about his growth, his struggles, and how he reached his peak! Business peers and Friends, family, famous celebrities, and even his old assistant were interviewed to formulate this story exclusively for you!
His initial days at Columbia
Alejandro Mendieta Blanco hails from a middle class, comfortable family background. He was born in Columbia. Everything was going very smoothly until his father, a Columbian doctor, lost everything they had when Alex was only nine years old. This was a turning point in their family and everyone’s lives because this is when Alex truly started to find himself out. Although it was one of the toughest phases of his life, he said that it was one of the best things that have ever happened to him every time he recalls those memories. In an early interview, he said, “when my dad lost all of his money, I got traumatized, even though I was just a 9-year-old kid. I experienced first-hand what it was like not to have money; not having money was embarrassing, frustrating, and I saw my parents constantly fighting. So I made myself a promise that I would become rich no matter what. When I grew up, I never forgot that promise and the pain that came from not having money”.
At the young age of 15, Alex had a fire burning in his heart that was yearning to do something. He did something that perhaps no Columbian child had ever done before; he dropped out of school, and with the help of what may be called a miracle, he received his high school diploma and completed school three years before any of his peers could.
The journey that made him what he is today
Alex was very new to the English language and did not speak or even understand it very well. He moved to Melbourne in Australia when he was 16 years old. He did not want to create a burden for his family, and so, all that he had asked of his father was a one-way ticket that would help him reach Australia. He had decided that once he reached there, he would do everything on his own to survive. He took care of his basic daily needs by working at small jobs like washing dishes, cleaning tables, and every other job that he could find. Even in his later interviews, he has said that even though this part of his life was very challenging, he would not change it for anything else. In his words- “as tough as it was, I wouldn’t change it for anything in the world; it made me tough as nails, and being a teenager was the best time to experience it.”
The ladder towards success
For the young Alex, success seemed to be a very fair shot. He failed at as many as seven business ventures. Everything seemed grim until he found his first real win. When asked about how he felt about himself during those days, he said, “one of my best qualities is my overly optimistic attitude; this cushioned the blows especially at the start when I failed so many times.”
Slowly, when he started hitting the right marks, everything fell in line for him. One win led to another, and with each step, his empire only grew further and further until his companies exceeded an estimate of $200,000,000 every year in turnover since 2017. We asked about his future perspective for 2021; a very confident and grounded Alex said, “the way we are going and with the new vaccines for COVID about to start being rolled out, he expects to hit $500,000,000 turnover for the first time.”
His other achievements
We all knew that Alex was a great businessman and meant for nothing but great but little did we know that there was something even greater about him that was kept hidden from us all these years. Alex has also been carrying out intense charity work for many years now, and he has only come out about it publicly in recent times. He has successfully opened two self-funding charitable organizations since 2016. The main one of the two is called “Give a child a bike.” Every year this organization donates about 500 bikes to underprivileged kids in Vietnam to help them ride to school instead of walking for hours. His second charity is the “Alex Mendieta Scholarship,” which helps multiple international students advance their final university studies every year.
