About Eric Shannon

 Hello, I'm Eric Shannon, raised in Chadds Ford, PA., I now live in Boulder, Colorado and my company LatPro Inc. is based in Weston, Florida. I'm a graduate of Tatnall high school, the University of Virginia (economics & urban planning), and the University of South Carolina's Master of International Business Studies (MIBS) program.

Before moving to Colorado in 2007 for health reasons, I was a member of the South Florida chapter of the Entrepreneurs' Organization (EO) and the H. Wayne Huizenga School of Business' Young Entrepreneur's Council (YEC). I'm a co-founder of the NicheBoards.com organization and my company LatPro.com is a charter member of The International Association of Employment Web Sites whose website we power.

In 1997 I launched the first job board for bilinguals who speak English/Spanish or English/Portuguese where I still serve as CEO. I did it for a couple of reasons:

1. I was using the Internet to search for a job which would involve travel to Latin America and speaking Spanish. No website served that purpose.
2. Since I was a kid, I wanted to run my own business.
3. My fiancé was required by her visa status to return to Guatemala for 2 years. I knew I wouldn’t find the kind of job I needed in Guatemala.
4. Previous jobs as a bank analyst, software consultant and marketing manager (chain saws and weedeaters) left me uninspired.
5. I was naïve!

Many people found the service we provided at LatPro.com useful and our business grew. Our ‘headquarters’ moved from Charlotte, NC to Cincinnati, OH to Guatemala City, Guatemala and finally to Fort Lauderdale, FL (town of Weston). Initially, we were strictly a family business, but, we too were caught up in the Internet boom – we sought out an angel investor to speed up our growth and to compete with sites like Laborum.com and Bumeran.com who had raised millions of dollars.

Fortunately, the crash of the NASDAQ prevented us from raising the $10 million we were seeking and we made a successful forced landing as a small but marginally profitable, organic-growth internet company. We came to focus almost exclusively on the Hispanic employment marketplace and recently have expanded our focus further with www.DiversityJobs.com to cover all minority jobseekers.

Many people ask me what a guy with a last name like Shannon is doing running LatPro.com, and now you know the story. My name may not be Hispanic, but my family is and that includes the company too: LatPro is a very Latino company with representatives of Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador, Guatemala, Peru, Puerto Rico, Venezuela and others. We also speak Spanish to our kids at home and try to take them to Guatemala as often as possible to make sure they don’t get too Shannonized.

What's special about this company and my job? It's satisfying to build a service that’s socially beneficial and from time to time helps someone realize their dreams. I also love the freedom of expression and creativity made possible by Internet business.

If you made it this far, maybe you want to follow me on twitter...

Eric Shannon, CEO
www.LatPro.com and
www.DiversityJobs.com