2021’s most interesting | “They said, if you can get it, absolutely.”
EDITOR’S NOTE: The 21st year of the millennium was expected to be a time of recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic. Instead of normal, 2021 gave us more of the same as 2020 with vaccinations, face mask requirements and more COVID-19 deaths. There were people who stood out during the year because of their work, accomplishments or their impact. Vida en el Valle selected the 10 most interesting people of 2021. Here is No. 5:
Former Riverbank Mayor Virginia Madueño not only launched a company during the pandemic shutdown but nurtured it into a multi-million-dollar operation.
Madueño was one of the 2021 Enterprising Women of the Year Award Winners and Champions in the “over $2 million and up to $5 million in annual revenues” category with her company SanGuard Growth LLC, based in Riverbank.
Enterprising Women Magazine recognizes world’s top female entrepreneurs.
Madueño recalls being at the grocery store and wondering what was going to happen to her because she wasn’t really operating her existing public relations business.
“Everything was kind of on a hold,” said the 55-year-old entrepreneur. “So, I came home and I was watching the governor’s first press conference when he was talking about the surges that they were seeing all over the country and, in particular, in New York.”
Madueño said the governor mentioned that California was going to need more personal protective equipment (PPE).
She had contacts in China because of her time as government relations director for the Chinese-American Trade Development Association. Madueño made a call to an associate in Beijing asking about reliable, safe PPE.
Madueño then called the state Office of Emergency Services inquiring about how as a small business owner could support the office and if she could sell PPE to them.
“They said, if you can get it, absolutely,” she said, adding that she then registered in the governor’s portal letting them know what she could source for the state as well as the state General Services.
“I immediately got my resale license activated. I applied with the Department of Homeland Security to get my clearances so that I could broker and clear customs for product that I was going to be bringing over,” said Madueño, adding that once she was registered, she started getting request for bids for PPE and from her kitchen counter she started bidding on all the products that the state was looking for, including hospital gowns.
Three weeks later she won the state bid $1.2 million in hospital gowns. Once the order was shipped and arrived in Los Ángeles, she rented a U-Haul truck, drove to Los Ángeles, and spent the night in the van with her colleague before she delivered them to St. Vincent Hospital in Los Ángeles.
And the rest is history.
After that first bit, Madueño said “we landed some amazing accounts with long-term health care facilities across the country, some of them that are national. And that’s where we scored.”
