Report: Asian American, Pacific Islander-owned businesses punch above their weight in New Mexico

Kyle Spolidoro is a fifth-degree black belt in taekwondo. But when it comes to owning a business, he’s still learning, he said.

Spolidoro was born in Korea and adopted by a family in northern New Mexico. He’s been teaching and training in martial arts for decades, and in 2024, he became the owner of his own studio, TriDo Martial Arts Academy, in Albuquerque’s Northeast Heights.

“Starting taekwondo was a way to get back to my Korean culture and learn about my Korean identity,” Spolidoro said.

Teaching came easily for him. He loves seeing his students grow up — some kids he taught in the early 2000s have found him on Facebook and have full-time jobs and their own children, which Spolidoro says is “heartwarming and amazing to see.”

“That side of it hasn’t exactly been too difficult,” Spolidoro said. “The difficult part for me has really been trying to establish how I want this business to run and the goals that I want to set up for it.”

After opening TriDo, Spolidoro got counseling from the Asian Business Collaborative, or ABC, an Albuquerque-based nonprofit supporting Asian American and Pacific Islander-owned businesses in New Mexico.

The Asian American community in Albuquerque, while small, is close-knit, Spolidoro said. “(They’re) very strong in the sense of trying to help each other and support each other, in business and just overall.”

Though Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders are the smallest racial group in New Mexico, accounting for less than 2% of the state’s population, they own 5% of the businesses in New Mexico with at least one paid employee, and just over 4% of businesses without employees, according to a new report from ABC measuring the economic impact of AAPI-owned businesses statewide.

“We’re a very small Asian population with a very high economic impact,” said ABC’s founder, Kristelle Siarza Moon, who commissioned the report. “I felt like it was there, but now the data backs it up.”

ABC is one of the only organizations aiding AAPI-owned businesses in New Mexico, according to Moon. The nonprofit provides training opportunities in business administration and resources for things like health insurance and fire inspection.

Moon, a Filipina American public relations executive, founded ABC in 2020 after securing pandemic relief for her own business, Siarza, a PR and marketing firm, and noticing a gap in resources for AAPI-owned businesses.

“We didn’t have an acting chamber of commerce specifically for the Asian community, but many people had tried to get it started,” she said. “A lot of these Asian-owned businesses didn’t have a portal or resource of any kind.”

Moon said she works to sustain New Mexico’s AAPI-owned businesses through cultural competency, which she describes as “economic development and social justice, kind of sitting at an intersection.”

Moon said she tries to meet AAPI entrepreneurs where they are by recognizing cultural nuances in business, finance and tradition.

“Asians are willing to take on debt. Asians are also willing to do business on a handshake. That’s very common, that it’s a friend of a friend that gives you a good lead, and that’s how the business happens,” she said. “Cultural competency means understanding the pathways that an Asian took to get here.”

New Mexico’s 1,599 AAPI-owned businesses contributed more than $2 billion in sales to the state’s economy in 2022, employing over 17,000 workers with an annual payroll of over $518 million, according to the report.

The majority of AAPI-owned businesses in New Mexico are in the accommodation and food services industry — around 24% of New Mexico’s hotels, restaurants and bars are AAPI-owned, the report found. These businesses add $451.2 million to the state’s economy and employ 10,131 workers.

The second-most common industry among AAPI business owners in New Mexico is health care and social assistance. About 6.4% of the state’s health care firms are owned by AAPI entrepreneurs, like Caren Phillips, who runs Ravenna Assisted Living on Albuquerque’s West Side.

Phillips quit her job as an occupational therapist in 2014 to buy Ravenna, which combined her two passions: health care and real estate.

“I always wanted to run my own business,” Phillips said. “However, knowing about it and wanting to do it is different from actually doing it, and the first three years were challenging.”

Phillips took courses at the Women’s Economic Self-Sufficiency Team, or WESST, in marketing and finance, and learned how to manage a team.

“I basically built everything from scratch — the sign-in sheet forms and the evaluation forms and the scheduling procedures and the admission procedures — because there was nothing,” she said.

Today, she has around 30 employees, and was recently given the Gold Award by Family Friendly New Mexico, which recognizes businesses that help employees maintain a work-life balance to care for their families.

“I can make decisions from an efficiency, corporate mentality, but I find myself drawn more to the human factor, especially because we’re taking care of residents,” Phillips said. “I can see if my staff is stressed, then they’re not going to be as patient and compassionate with the residents, which affects the core of our business.”

Phillips, who is Filipina, said New Mexico’s AAPI community is small — she compares it to her native Chicago, where the AAPI group she was a part of was big enough to have an annual parade downtown — but she looks forward to seeing it grow.

“There aren’t — or weren’t — very many groups or business groups” for AAPIs in New Mexico, she said. “But I think that’s changing.”