He paid a million-dollar debt selling fish on the street and today he has his own business

Córdoba is a municipality in the heart of the Montes de María that does not sound like much when talking about the department of Bolívar, in Colombia. In that town, as in others in the area, plagued by the violence of the guerrillas and paramilitaries for decades, there are not many opportunities for the inhabitants. But Córdoba had a diamond in the rough that his people had discovered very early.

Of Heber de Jesus Palomino Only good comments were heard in the 150 kilometers of the town during the 90s. He was the best in school and an outstanding talent playing soccer. When he was 12 years old, when he walked through the town he could hear how the mothers sitting on the terraces of dry land told his children: “Look at Heber, that boy is going to be big. That’s how you have to be”.

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Heber was the hope of that humble, almost unknown town, where there wasn’t much else to do besides fishing.

At the age of 14, Heber was already preaching the word of God in the Christian temple that he attended with his entire family. He was showing himself more and more like the model child.

He finished school at 16 and wanted to try his luck with soccer, but it didn’t work out, no scouts ever saw him, and that’s where his biggest dream ended. Later, when he was 17 years old, his parents got the money to send him to the university in Cartagena. They had to fix and resell many refrigerators, that was the family business, and lend money to be able to send him to study in the capital.

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But they put him to study Dentistry, a career that did not interest him and that made him feel unhappy.

However, taking advantage of his time at the university, he set up his first business. He collected orders for sportswear from his teammates and bought them from Adidas, Nike and Puma. At first the business worked, but it was a mirage.

The fishermen of the Magdalena River sell the product at a lower price on the river bank. (Photo: Oswaldo Rocha).

“I got tired of studying Dentistry and with the clothing business and another one in mind I returned to the town to lend some money and set up a gym. I had done the accounts and if I charged 2,000 pesos every hour, there were more than 100,000 a day, more than 36 million a year, and that’s how I paid what I borrowed for the race and for the gym itself, ”he explains.

But that never worked out, it had only been two months and the gym went bankrupt. In addition, since he had returned he had to endure the stares and some reproaches from his family for having left the studio and become an incipient “entrepreneur”.

Now, on the terraces of Córdoba, people murmured: “Wow, there goes the Heber. So much that he promised and look, just like the other flip flops ”.

Heber had a large debt in the town and there in the capital it had gone badly for the sports brands and he couldn’t leave it like that. At only 20 years old, he already owed about 34 million pesos.

In addition, he was mentally weak, spiritually he was in dilemma, and even physically he was affected by worries.

“But I did not give up and God did not abandon me”affirms Heber, who decided to do everything in his power to get out of the abyss, and he would do it in the name of his faith and his principles.

All day all night…

“One day a friend told me that there was a firm business with some fish. He told me to lend him 50 and he would return 70 of the proceeds from the sale of fish. That is a very popular business here in Córdoba. I gave him the money and he gave me my 70 on time in the afternoon. So I said, if he wins with that, I’d better do it directly and I’ll have more profits”, explains Heber.

The next day, he got up at 4 am and went to the river. He bought 100,000 pesos in fish and went walking all over town to sell them.

All morning he spent selling the fish. When it was 1 in the afternoon, everything was already sold and the profit was almost double the amount invested. Then he would go to work in a small factory nearby where they peeled and ground sesame seeds.

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A post shared by Heber De Jesús (@heberdejesusadnroca)

“I worked there from 2 to 7 pm Then I would go home, eat anything and sleep for 4 hours. At midnight I was going to do a short shift in the work of a large road that they were doing here. There, he helped to load packages of cement, cans of sand, make the mix and cut the forest”, he narrates.

The only days he didn’t work he had to spend the same on the street, because the collectors were looking for him and since he still couldn’t pay, despite all that work, he had to hide in a pipe. “I hid under the bridge and didn’t come out of there until nightfall,” he says.

He had those three jobs that added up to 20 hours a day for two years. Because of this, Heber went from being a man 1.85 meters tall and 80 kilos in weight to weighing almost 60. People believed that he was sick.

“By breaking my back, I managed to pay everything I owed. I even managed to save for my resurgence, because I was not going to stay selling fish, I never stopped dreaming of a prosperous future”, Heber narrates.

That long road…

With the savings he managed to make, Heber went to Barranquilla, this time he was going to study what he wanted. He entered Sena to study Resource Management, the idea was to learn to undertake and optimize his efforts and inputs.

“But that was another odyssey in my life. The savings went quickly and again hunger and worries were the daily bread again, ”she says.

And that of daily bread was not just a metaphor, there were many days during those two years of study that he could only eat bread and water due to lack of money.

However, Heber had a plan. “The idea was to record how he got ahead. He wanted to record everything on video and share it with the whole world, for people to see that it is possible to get ahead and that there are many dignified ways, ”he says.

So he bought a compact camera and edited everything he recorded on a friend’s computer who lent it to him almost overnight so that Heber could save money and not have to pay for an internet cafe.

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A post shared by Heber De Jesús (@heberdejesusadnroca)

“I sold avocados, clothing, scrapings, chepacorinas, whey, cheese, etc., and the idea was to teach people how much to invest, how to manage the resource, and how to optimize profits. He did all this while studying at the Seine ”, he narrates.

About the Seine, Heber explains that he had to go every other day, because the money was not enough for the tickets. And so two years passed. Heber lost weight again to the dangerous 60 kilos that he hated. He looked sick again and was mentally exhausted.

But two impulses came into his life that would definitely get him out of his bad situation.

Famous for a cheese

The first was that Heber met and fell in love with Yurleidis, the woman who would change his life.

“I lived in Mr. Gabriel’s pension. He rented rooms for 500,000 pesos, but since he knew I had almost nothing to pay, he let me sleep in his living room and help him with things around the house. But when I joined Yurleidis we went to live in our own room, ”he recounts.

With her support, things got better, and one day his almost two years of recording videos paid off.

”A friend told me that he was going to send a cheese to his family in Barranquilla. I was in Córdoba and I told him that I would do him a favor by taking him and that he would let me record the entire process to show people. That video was the one that changed everything,” he recalls.

The recording process was the same as always. Introduce the artisans, explain the ingredients, quantities, objects that can be improvised so as not to get stranded doing it, and the prices at which they can be sold.

Heber drinks coffee with his employees during their work days in the same totumas that he makes. (Photo: DNA Roca).

He uploaded that video to Facebook in 2015. At the time, his page had fewer than 3,000 followers. He had no advertising, he did not monetize anything and his videos did not exceed 300 views. But the coastal cheese came to him like manna in the desert. “It passed 1 million views in one day and hit almost 5 million that week. We went viral and the page grew a lot”says Heber, still excited.

In addition, the cheese video complied with the rules of the platform – something Heber always cared about – and managed to monetize, representing a great economic boost for him and a reward for all the hard work of the last two years.

And to that success was added that one day Yurleidis told him to go sell fried food on a corner that he had seen and it looked good. And so it was, she had a tremendous nose for business and in one day she earned almost half the salary she was paid in her practices in the Seine. So, Heber left the internship and created her own company, with which she would also help people start businesses.

Roca DNA is born

heber founded DNA Rock. The purpose of this was to collect all the recipes from the Colombian Caribbean coast and learn how to optimize the resources used for their creation –as he learned in Sena– and design strategies to sell them and make a profit.

“The idea is that people from towns with few resources start any type of business for which they have the capacity. If someone prefers to do it with egg arepas, if another prefers to sell cakes, or if someone prefers to make chepacorinas for export, for example. The idea was to bring them closer to the proposal on video, explain to them how much they could invest, the risks and advantages there were, and the profits”, says the now businessman.

In addition, ADN Roca resumed the resale of fish in the towns on the banks of the Magdalena River. Heber and his wife returned to Córdoba and have their own land and farm, and they started an agricultural project. They seek to refine the methods of the fishermen, optimize manual work, sell more and build their own hatcheries, to have something when the river is not so grateful.At the moment, there are about 30 fishermen who are being trained and have joined the ADN Roca project.

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A post shared by Heber De Jesús (@heberdejesusadnroca)

Also, on the company’s official website, ventures that are adopting the company’s methods and Heber’s recommendations are advertised. They are shown as examples of developments on the Coast and are not charged anything.

”The idea of ​​ADN Roca in the medium term is to generate many direct and indirect jobs and help create and sustain enterprises. In the future, the goal is to help create one million jobs in the region. My wife, my 14 collaborators and I are working every day with that goal in mind”, concludes Heber.

Today ADN Roca has channels on YouTube, Twitter, TikTok, Instagram and Facebook, accumulating almost two million followers.

Now Heber’s concern – so to speak – is to help everyone he can get ahead. That rough diamond polished itself through blows and bad moments, and now –as only one diamond can polish another– he seeks to bring out the shine in others.

Source: Elcomercio