COMMUNITY
 Eunice Williams |
September 2005
(Read the previous stories in the series.)
Eunice Williams was born and raised in the Dominican Republic, a poor country where life was hard. Around 1980, Eunice came to believe that she could accomplish more for herself somewhere else, so she gathered her courage and moved to the United States.
Eunice attended the American Youth Center in Washington, D.C., where she studied English. Shortly thereafter, she attended American University on a one-year scholarship as a Business Management student. She was then able to secure a job with the University of the District of Columbia, but didn’t stay long before being hired away by DC General Hospital as a financial counselor.
During her 13 years at the hospital, Ms. Williams received additional training in finances and conversational English, maximizing her proficiency in providing English-Spanish language translation services and processing health insurance claims for patients. Eunice also met her husband, Albert, while working at the hospital. Following the birth of their first child, Eunice decided to go into business on her own—to gain control of her own destiny.
Eunice’s first entrepreneurial venture, a snack bar at the Chesapeake Ranch Estates, gave her substantially more freedom than her job at the hospital. The business was extremely successful, and a couple of years later, she decided to change her focus to her family’s heating and air conditioning business, Southern Maryland Refrigeration. Like the snack bar, business for Southern Maryland Refrigeration took off easily.
Today, nine years after its beginning, Southern Maryland Refrigeration is still going strong. “We get most of our work through referrals,” Ms. Williams says. “And we’re kept pretty busy—we don’t have to do much advertising at all.”
Although there are more than 1.2 million Hispanic-owned, non-farm related businesses in the United States, that’s only about six percent of U.S. businesses.
Southern Maryland Refrigeration specializes in serving commercial customers located throughout the Maryland-DC-Virginia area and have four full-time employees. Ms. Williams handles the office work and marketing with occasional assistance from her two daughters.
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As busy as the business keeps her, Ms. Williams still makes time to serve her community. She is involved with the Apostolic Pentecostal Church of Lusby (that’s Iglesia Apostolica Pentecostal de Lusby, in Spanish) where many local Hispanics gather and services are delivered exclusively in Spanish.
To contact Southern Maryland Refrigeration, call 410-326-7169.