I was born in Monsey as the seventh of eight children. My father had a very varied career, but from the time I was a child, he made his living as a day trader.
“For yeshivah I went to the Viener Cheder in Monsey. At that time it was more of a community cheder—we had bend-downs and chasidishe hats all in one class. Then I went to Yeshiva Ketana Ner Torah.
“When I was finishing high school, I decided that I wanted to go out and work. I had a conversation with my parents, and we agreed that as long as I committed to having a chavrusa, I could find a job and do something productive, and that’s exactly what I did. Even as a young teenager, I was always hustling and creating opportunities, whether it was selling candy in school, packing sefarim in shul or organizing neighborhood carnivals with my family.
“I started out doing deliveries. Someone in my neighborhood had a commercial kitchen where he would cook for a lot of small mosdos, yeshivos and schools that didn’t have their own kitchen. At that point I was looking for a job that came with a car of some sort so I could be mobile, and this guy offered me a commercial van, so I was in, even at eight dollars an hour or whatever minimum wage was at the time.
“I did that for a couple of months until I got an opportunity to work for someone who was doing maintenance for large residential buildings. I would deliver maintenance supplies and deal with supers. That’s when I began learning how to work with the Spanish-speaking community, which proved to be critical for my career in HR. I learned how to navigate the streets and the people working on them. I would go to the Bronx warehouse and get things that the building superintendents needed—salt in the winter, snowblowers, tiles, lumber, paint if they were redoing an apartment, and so on. I had to leave Monsey by 6:00 a.m. to get to the warehouse by 7:00, so I’d daven in Brooklyn later.
“My days would often run until 7:00 or 8:00 at night, and I really enjoyed it. It kept me focused and productive, and it gave me a head start in the business world.
“Then I was offered the chance to join one of the largest heimish-owned manufacturing businesses. I liked that it had one central location so I wouldn’t be running around so much, and that it was a growing company. It was located in Jersey City, a pretty rough neighborhood, and the crew was pretty rough, too. I started out as an assistant supervisor for a department where orders were prepared for shipping. I had to make sure that the crew, which comprised about 20 employees, was collecting the correct orders and organizing them so that they would be easy to find when the trucks had to be loaded.
“It was a new world for me. The general manager was a great guy who helped me a lot, but it was my job to manage my own group, who were not the friendliest people. I realized very quickly that if I wanted to manage them effectively, I would need to understand their culture and speak their language, literally and figuratively. I learned how to talk to people and assign work in a respectful way so that they would actually want to do what they were expected to do. Of course, I made some missteps along the way.
“Here’s an example. In yeshivah, the boys are schmoozing, and the mashgiach comes in, claps his hands and says, ‘Come on, guys. Let’s go. Back to work,’ and they start learning again. At work, there was a crew that was talking in the corner, and I did the same thing, ‘Come on, guys. Let’s go back to work,’ and I clapped my hands. One guy gave me the death stare. I could have let it slide, but I notice the little reactions people have to every interaction. I went over to him afterward and asked, ‘Francisco, what happened? Why were you looking at me like that?’ He answered in Spanish, ‘I’m not your dog. Don’t clap at me.’ I learned not to ignore those cues. If a reaction seems off, address it.
“Realizing that the cultural difference was greater than I initially thought, I made it my business to understand their backgrounds. I spent a lot of time listening to them. After work I would go to one of the workers and ask him to explain his routine to me and tell me his life story. I did that with most of the team.
“I learned what it meant to lead people, and I also learned that I don’t want to do physical labor, so I had to get into management and lead people at a larger scale or I’d be working in a warehouse for the rest of my life.
“After a while, the supervisor I was reporting to left, and I was promoted to run the department on my own. Three years into my career there, growing through the ranks, working hard, being the first one in and the last one out, I recognized that I have a gift for understanding people. People connected to me at all levels, and I connected with people at all levels.
“Every company has an HR function, whether they know it or not. It’s just that often it’s the owner or the general manager filling it. The HR structure developed as the organization was growing, and the general manager was very busy with it, but it wasn’t a formal framework.