We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Rolando Diaz. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Rolando below.

Rolando, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. What do you think it takes to be successful?

This is a wide door, but to me success is a feeling it really doesn’t involve any materialistic items. Its a point of accomplishment, reaching a goal that brings a certain type of happiness to your life and keeps you motivated to continue to push forward and keep that tank full.
It is believing on the vision first and seeing it completed it, staying focus regarding of the obstacles that will come, it is easy to get discouraged when you find that bump on the road.
The mind needs to be trained to expect that bump, learn from it and dig deep to find the positivity of it and the lesson that is leaving behind.
Experience is the best teacher, its just the most expensive because I will cost us time and trail of error time after time, so keeping that positive mind is key to success.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers

The food and service industry has a lot of different ways to be described, but I grew up always around good food in Costa Rica, my grandfather own a restaurant, my mother and uncles were the “employees” or what I like to call it the free help. I lived in Costa Rica the first 20 years of my life, after I came to live to Minnesota my first job was a in Kitchen where I worked there for 2 years, I didnt know how to speak a word of English, so my first task was to learn the language as fast as possible; I did not speak to all the latinos in the kitchen unless they would speak to me in English because I felt frustrated that I couldn’t understand people when they spoke to me in English.
6 months later I could hold a conversation and be understood, once I got that out of the way, I always felt the need to create something worth talking about but being new and living in a new country not knowing how things worked was my second obstacle and like a good stubborn latino I was not about to let that stop me, so I work in different jobs, from selling cars to retail and construction and ended up back in the kitchen where I enjoyed the most.
I work in different restaurants and finally understood how things worked, and started to do private events in peoples homes with my wife Nicole while we both had full time jobs, we continue to advertise that and all the money we made we put back into the business, equipment, advertising, storage,
In 2010 went through one of my biggest fears and lost my mother due to an illness, she was mom and dad so it was very though and back to my comments in regards to success I took that very bitter taste in my mouth and made my goal to put her name wherever I could “Marna”, and that very difficult time I turned into something worth talking about, so my wife and I created Marnas Catering, we had a lot of bumps in the way as we navigated through the process of making it into an actual business, while we were trying to book events or just get a little bit of reputation out there we continued to work our full-time jobs and after that I would go home and prep food, answer emails and many late nights working through licensing, permits, LLC, etc.
One of our friends asked us if we did weddings we my fake it until you make it told her right away yes, I still remember that wedding we worked so hard, we made a lot of mistakes but the food and service was still great; We did not had a system for anything, no staff no nothing, we rented everything and hauled it back and forth, yikes.
But the money in weddings is great, so that was it our focus tuned into weddings only and whatever else would come across our way.
We started paying different wedding websites for exposure, and slowly we started booking a few weddings per year. 6, 10 weddings, next year, around 30 and from there we jumped to about 130 weddings per year currently not including corporate, graduations etc, and we turn down alot of them because out popular dates book every fast.
Now we have a team of sales, Executive chef that do everything my wife and I did at the beginning, and they work very close with brides to help them create a perfect wedding.
I am proud of the process the journey, our vision behind the hard work and how intencional and close we stay with our staff, that helps to deliver the message, our message of enjoying life, create memories and find the good into the bad that comes your way.
Since the beginning we have won best of weddings 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2023.
We opened a restaurant September 2019 (Marnas Eatery and Lounge) and also won best latino restaurant 2022.
So long story short, im proud of many things, our staff, our clients, and our vision.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

To me simple, because I grew up very very poor in Costa Rica and I learned to value the little things in life so I always go back to those moments to have that resilience. Loosing my mother, but now im married with 2 boys that are very important to me.
Most of my life growing up was helping my mother work to pay bills but I learn a lot of things during those journeys.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

I had to unlearn that because I grew up with very little opportunities, poor and no real future that it does not define the path that I am able to jump on. I say this because it happens often, living in certain circumstances makes the mind very cloudy and even the fact to have a good job, or owning anything seems that it is only for the “other people” the lucky ones, it shuts down, you feel less and out of place when you are around “those people”.
So stepping out of that mind set is what I had to unlearn and believe really deep that I can do anything and that some of the best success stories come from dark places.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.marnascartering.com www.marnaseatery.com
• Instagram: @rolandodiaz007
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rolandotut

Image Credits
ERIN RENEE PHOTOGRAPHY