HispanicBusiness

When Gilbert Vasquez launched his certified public accounting firm 40 years ago at age 30, it was a bold move.

Back then, large accounting firms wouldn't hire people with ethnic surnames, he said. Not even the highest-performing student in Vasquez's graduating class -- a Japanese man -- could get hired by a large firm after college.

"If you were Latino, Asian, African American, the answer was 'no,'" Vasquez told HispanicBusiness.com.

So what made him think a young Hispanic man from Los Angeles could start his own firm?

"I had the ability to talk to people," he said.

And talk to people he did. Vasquez began by asking a friend -- his life insurance broker -- for a $2,500 loan. With that, he rented a tiny office in East Los Angeles, where he toiled away by himself for 80 hours a week.

Fast forward to today. Vasquez & Company -- which provides audits, tax preparations, litigation support and other accounting services for organizations such as non-profits, municipalities and school districts -- employs 50 people. It is the oldest and largest Hispanic-owned accounting firm in California.

Tonight, the company is celebrating both its 40th anniversary and Vasquez's 70th birthday with a private reception at the City Club in Los Angeles.

Through the decades, Vasquez & Co. has employed about 1,000 people, and landed major clients such as the county of Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Unified School District, the city of Norwalk, Calif., and AltaMed Health Services.

Having the audacity to start his own firm hasn't been Vasquez's only bold move. Over the course of his career, he has proven unafraid to advocate for minority accountants -- even when doing so meant being branded a "renegade" or "radical" by powerful peers.

Speaking by phone on Monday, Vasquez attributed much of his success to good old-fashioned hard work.

"I mean, I was working 80 hours a week," he said of his early days. "It took that kind of effort to get things off the ground. If you want to win, you have to get up early."

In Vasquez's view, the prejudices of the large accounting firms began to thaw somewhere around 1965 -- after the Watts Riots in Los Angeles, in which 34 people died in a series of riots fueled by racial tension between whites and blacks.

But even then, he said, the change amounted to a slow "trickle."

The 1970s witnessed its own brand of discrimination. By that time, Vasquez was established, and made a point to speak up for minority accountants.

In the late 1970s, for instance, when Vasquez was president of the California Board of Accountancy, a group of certified accountants from the Philippines sued the state board for denying them waivers to practice in the state. The state board routinely granted such waivers to accountants from the British Commonwealth, who were white, despite how their standards for licensure were lower than those for accountants in the Philippines.

Before the case went to trial, Vasquez voted to grant them waivers. His move drew rebukes from his fellow members of the state board -- all of them white. The California Society of Certified Public Accountants labeled him a radical. In time, though, Vasquez was vindicated: The accountants from the Philippines won the case.

And then there was the organization he founded -- the Association of Latino Professionals in Finance and Accounting, which became a national organization in 1972. The move so annoyed the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants that it publicly referred to the new organization as a "renegade" and an "outlaw."