Lilly Benitez
by Sean Colligan
In recent years, a family road trip might present a few new challenges like managing fuel costs and attention spans. But at least navigating on the road is a pretty straightforward experience with a smartphone: punch in the address of your destination, hit “start”, then be on your way and simply follow the steps as you go. However, for those born sometime between the interstate highway system and satellite navigation, things weren’t so simple. Someone in the family would often be a designated “navigator”, whose responsibility was to read huge, unwieldy folding paper maps covered with different color-coded lines, symbols and names, all the while telling the driver where to turn next without losing track of the route to their destination.
Deciphering a map to give accurate directions the old-fashioned way was challenging enough, even if you could read it perfectly, but what if the map you were reading was in a different language? And what if you weren’t just driving through different states, but different countries as well? If your family was depending on you to guide them across unfamiliar terrain and multiple borders while translating from a map written in your second language, could you be the “navigator”?
Lilly Benitez, first-generation entrepreneur and founder of Blade Craft Barber Academy, took on this challenge as navigator for her family’s road trip all the way from Dallas, Texas to her parents’ home country of El Salvador to visit their relatives. She chronicles this experience alongside her journey of creating her own business in her first book, Create Something. As one of the only members of her family that could speak, read and write using English, she not only had to keep track of their route using an English map, but interpret directions for her Spanish-speaking parents as well. Not to mention, she was 10 years old.
“I was always their translator ever since I can remember,” Lilly told Publishizer when retelling the experience. While the circumstances may seem like a daunting task for anyone, let alone an elementary schooler, she remembers the adventure fondly as a bonding experience with her parents and 2 siblings.
“Road trips were really fun for us growing up,” she recalled. In fact, this trip was something of a special occasion, as her family would usually fly to visit their relatives in El Salvador every Summer. The idea to drive came from Benitez’s late father who, as she describes at the beginning of Create Something, was “working as a humble mechanic, carpenter, plumber, moonlighting as an electrician, or multi-purpose repairman, as long as it was honest work, and he could be home for dinner.”
In whatever free time he managed to carve out, Lilly’s father had restored an older model Mitsubishi Montero with an entirely new engine. Proud of his work and wanting to put it to the test, as well as save some money forgoing the airfare, he came up with the idea for the family to drive together in the revived car through Texas, Mexico, and Guatemala to get to El Salvador.
“My dad was a dreamer, and sold my mom on the idea,” Lilly said. “So they were like, ‘You’ll be responsible for this map, you’ll help us get there!’ Now as I think of it, how much I was really responsible for it, I have no idea. But I felt like I was!”
The trip would prove to be an enduring memory, one of the many she shares with her mother and siblings. It would also prove to be an important learning experience, a chance to prepare her for the challenges she would face in adulthood as she navigated the path of starting her own business. And just like the task her family gave her on the road to El Salvador, Lilly faced it head on.
Her determination came from her unshakable vision for Blade Craft Academy; a barbering school/barber shop that not only trains aspiring barbers while developing their professional skills, but provides customers with everything from simple cuts to straight-razor shaves as well as a “third place” aside from work and home that gives them, as Lilly describes in her book, “a slice of peace”.
This vision for Blade Craft, like many things in her life, all began from another memory of her father, before the fateful road trip. After fleeing the civil war in El Salvador in the mid 1980s, Lilly’s parents raised her and her siblings in Dallas, where they became part of a close-knit immigrant community. A major pillar of that community was their local church, which her family would attend every Sunday. Lilly’s father’s various jobs may have had him working in dust, motor oil and everything in between, but he always looked his best for church. Lilly clearly remembers her father shaving in front of the mirror on Sunday mornings, which began her fascination with barbering. “It was really the transformation,” she said when describing the lasting impression of this memory, “when he would transform from this sawdust-covered, smelly man that’s been out in the Texas heat all day to a clean-cut man in a button-down shirt and slacks for church.” This “transformation” is what propelled her towards barbering and what it can do for one’s appearance and confidence. “With just a haircut and a clean shave, a man looks so much younger and put together.”
From that childhood memory, Lilly created a place where that same experience can be created for every client, no matter where they’re from or how they identify. But starting Blade Craft from the ground up was no easy task. Again, like the road trip from her childhood, Lilly had to stay on course while navigating through unfamiliar territory. And much like her role as interpreter for her parents, she found herself deciphering an entirely new language: business. This meant becoming fluent in projections and accounting and immersion in the exotic bureaucracies of banks and city offices. Despite the constant hurdles, from red tape to dead-end partnerships, Lilly refused to give up on her vision. As she wrote in Create Something, “You will find a way to push past the discomfort, though, because the purpose of what you are doing is greater than the temporary discomfort.”
After establishing Blade Craft in Deep Ellum, Texas, a similar purpose inspired her to write her first book about her experiences. Part memoir, part guide for those looking to achieve their own unique vision, Lilly’s authorial debut provides meaningful perspectives for anyone who wants to do what her title suggests and Create Something. The portions of the book sharing her stories of her family and the road trip to El Salvador are especially memorable, as she decided to present them bilingually; in Spanish and English. Although it incidentally creates a welcome experience for bilingual readers, it was simply a result of how Lilly began writing her book during a trip to Mexico in 2019.
“Being in Latin America at the moment when I was struck with the sense of responsibility to write this book, I started with the road trip and I wrote that in Spanish,” she said. “Then, whenever I would find myself needing breaks from that, I would work on the business plan of creating the academy in English, and I figured later on I’ll figure out how they’ll connect.”
The presentation of these bilingual passages, two columns on the page with Spanish on the left and English on the right, comes from yet another memory from Lilly’s childhood: the bilingual Bibles from the church her family attended. When discussing her idea behind this style, she remarks that when presenting the two texts side-by-side, “your eyes can’t help but decide what it wants to read.” She noticed this often at her church, where older generation immigrants spoke primarily Spanish, while those around her age in the younger generations spoke more English. Bilingual Bibles with Spanish and English side-by-side, as she emulates in Create Something,were the main texts used in her youth group.
This also led to a surprise when Lilly’s mother got her hands on an eagerly awaited hardback copy of her daughter’s first book. When reading the Spanish passages, Lilly remarked her mother “had so many laughs.”
“I created a little coffee shop in the waiting area of the barber academy, and [my mom] helps us make lattes there,” Lilly said. “And she was just there, having really good laughs, and was like, ‘I can’t believe you remembered this.’ That’s a really beautiful gift that the book has given me so far.”
Her mother also gave copies of the book to her Spanish-speaking neighbors, and it led to an invitation to speak at a local all-Spanish cosmetology school. When it comes to the inclusion of Spanish into Create Something, Lilly said, “it’s in the accent that I grew up in, it’s in the voice that I grew up in.”
When bringing Create Something out into the world, Benitez was enthusiastic about her choice to work with Publishizer and their support throughout the process, especially talking to publishing companies as a new author.
“Even having those phone calls, even if I didn’t work with them, gave me a lot of information,” she said. “One of the conversations I had is what gave me the idea to do the Audible recording with Voiceover Vermont. And I’m really glad I did, because I was able to put the book in both English and English-Spanish bilingual, which was really important to me.” Lilly is also the first author to release their book through Reader Advanced, Publishizer’s newest program for authors focused on direct support for authors and their readers. She was even able to include the greater Blade Craft Barber Academy community into the process, recruiting a designer she was familiar with for the exterior cover and having her social media followers vote on their favorite design.
Whether it’s enriching her students & clients’ lives, advocating for local businesses like hers as part of the Deep Ellum Foundation Association, or writing Create Something as a guide for those who want to follow her example, Lilly remains focused on building and strengthening a sense of community wherever she goes. And she maintains that if you have a vision and put in the work to make it happen, you can achieve the same. “Like it says in the book,” Lilly told Publishizer, “’You are the pudding. You are the product.’ Wherever you go is where people are gonna go.”
