For over 30 years, Mi Costeñita has built its business on more than food. Founded in Chicago in 1995, the company is a manufacturer and distributor of dried peppers, spices, herbs, snacks, salsas, marinades, and seasonings. But what matters most to the company is not what it sells. It is how it treats people.
As CEO Juan Valerio explained, Mi Costeñita was built around values like family, community, hospitality, and care.
Those values shape the way the company serves customers, supports employees, and approaches growth. They helped the business reach an important milestone: 30 years in business and continued expansion across multiple distribution centers.
But as the business grew, so did the demands behind the scenes. Juan and his team realized that what worked at a smaller size no longer gave them the visibility, communication, or protection they would need for the future.
When Growth Exposed the Gaps
Mi Costeñita’s growth brought more opportunity, but it also brought more complexity. As the company expanded, there was more movement across the business, more coordination required between locations, and more room for issues to pop up.
Communication between locations was not as easy as it needed to be. Operations became more difficult to track. And the technology supporting the business had not grown at the same pace as the company itself.
“Sales are growing, but then it kind of increases the ability for there to be problems. Just because there’s so much more movement, everything has to go right,” said Juan.
The business was harder to manage with the same systems and processes it had used before. Mi Costeñita was not trying to recover from a failure. It was trying to stay ahead of one. Juan could see that if the company kept growing without a stronger foundation in place, the cracks could put the entire organization at risk of crumbling.
Action Before Crisis
Juan says it plainly: the company did not have the systems in place that a business of its size needed. What worried him most was the cost of doing nothing.
The turning point did not come from one major outage or cybersecurity incident. It came from realizing that Mi Costeñita had outgrown the way it was operating.
Juan saw the risk ahead of time and chose to do something about it before the business was forced into a reactive decision.
Choosing a Partner Based on Value
The answer was never to find just any provider. It was to find the right one.
“I don’t make decisions all the time on costs. I make it based off of how I feel about the people and the companies I’m trying to engage with,” said Juan.
Mi Costeñita’s relationship with Impact developed over time. It started with print services, then grew into conversations around cybersecurity and IT infrastructure.
He talks about the consistency, expertise, patience, and relationship-building. The team kept showing up, listening, asking questions, and taking time to understand the business.
Just as important, they reflected the same values Juan cared about in his own company: putting people first, thinking long term, and building real trust.
For Juan, culture mattered. He wanted a partner that cared about people, took relationships seriously, and felt like a genuine fit.
He added: “I didn’t look for the cheapest. Right? I looked for value.”
The Pressure Behind the Decision
Even with that confidence, making the final decision still carried a lot of weight.
This was a major investment. It required internal support. It required Juan to advocate for change. And because he was the one pushing for it, he knew the responsibility would fall on him if the decision did not work out.
“I’m the one pushing for this… if it doesn’t go the way I want it to work, I got to jump on the sword,” said Juan.
One of Juan’s biggest concerns going into the transition was how disruptive it might be. With so many moving parts, it was fair to wonder whether new systems, security changes, and infrastructure updates would create downtime or slow the business down.
But what happened instead was a process built around planning.
Weekly meetings gave both teams structure and accountability. The early phase focused on understanding what needed to happen, how it would happen, and when. The work was organized before major changes were made.
And when challenges came up, including delays that were outside anyone’s control, the team communicated what was going on and kept moving. If one item had to pause, they shifted focus to another. Instead of becoming chaotic, the process stayed flexible and clear.
Most importantly, Mi Costeñita did not experience the kind of disruption Juan had feared since “everything was planned out well.”
Bridging the Gap on a Disconnected System
One of the biggest wins came from improving communication across Mi Costeñita’s distribution centers.
Before, the company’s locations were siloed. If leadership wanted to align teams across the business, it often meant travel, repeated conversations, and a lot of effort to make sure every location was hearing the same message.
That made it harder to share vision, coordinate priorities, and move forward as one connected company.
Once the new infrastructure and AV improvements were in place, that began to change. Teams across locations could connect more often and more easily. Leadership could communicate with multiple warehouses at once. Conversations became more direct, more consistent, and more useful.
“We were able to get everybody back together [and] had more frequent communications,” said Juan. “And then everybody’s there together because we all represent the same company.”
For Juan, this was not just a technical upgrade. It changed how the business operated day to day. It made it easier to share direction, hear feedback, and keep people aligned across the company.
Benefits Beyond Communication
With stronger systems in place and better connection across locations, Mi Costeñita became more strategic in how it operated. Product launches could be discussed more clearly. Challenges could be identified faster. Leadership could talk through not just what was happening, but what needed to happen next.
Juan describes this as a real shift in how the business could respond, especially when something was not working.
That matters because the result was not just smoother operations. It was a business that could grow with more intention and respond more quickly when needed.
One of the clearest signs that the transformation was working came from employee behavior.
As cybersecurity awareness became more embedded in the company, employees started paying closer attention. They questioned suspicious emails. They flagged unusual messages. They became more active in protecting the business instead of assuming security was only someone else’s responsibility.
For Juan, that shift stood out.
That is the kind of result that shows the change was real. It was not only happening in systems or behind the scenes. It was reaching the people inside the organization.
Growing the Right Way
For Mi Costeñita, the real outcome was not simply better technology.
It was the ability to grow with more confidence, communicate with more clarity, and support a larger business with systems that matched its goals. Just as important, it helped the company keep protecting the culture that made it successful in the first place.
“If they don’t treat their people well, how do you think they’re going to treat you?” said Juan. “That’s ultimately what made me need to work with Impact.”
That belief shaped Mi Costeñita’s decision from the start. And it is what made this more than a technology project. It became a story about building the kind of foundation a growing business needs to keep moving forward.
Hear more from Juan about his relationship with Impact and how he realized it was time to partner with an MSP by watching What a Real MSP Partnership Looks Like.
