La Divina Italian Café is one of two Louisiana companies and 102 nationwide recognized with the Small Business Championship award by SCORE, a nonprofit that provides mentoring to small businesses. The Perkins Road restaurant will receive a $1,000 gift card to Sam’s Club, which is a partner in the annual awards program, as well as an all-expense-paid trip to a SCORE training event and mentoring by the nonprofit.
La Divina is owned by Lance and Mary LeBlanc, who chronicled in their online application for the award the struggles they endured when working to open the cafe in 2013. Applicants were asked to answer a single question: “What sacrifice have you made to help your business succeed?”
“We took a second mortgage on our home and I left a well-paying job with benefits and security to run the cafe full time with no pay,” Lance LeBlanc wrote in the application. “August 30, 2013, was the day that we signed our business loan. That same week we received the news that my 83-year-old father needed emergency heart surgery. Four months of hospital stay, through surgery, complications and rehabilitation, took place while Mary and I did our best to have the doors to our dream ready to open on time.”
Mary LeBlanc says the $1,000 gift card will be used to buy kitchen equipment.
“We started our business with a shoestring budget and a keen eye for a deal on used, low- cost equipment. Our chef has been very patient with less-than-par equipment: a convection oven that is too small with broken parts, no mixer with which to bake,” she says in a posting on the SCORE website. The money, she says, “could go far in providing our chef with the tools to increase production and therefore revenue and profits.”
The other Louisiana business honored with the SCORE award is Who Dat Barbershop in New Orleans. See the full list of all winners.
