A stately and historic home on Missouri Avenue in Mercedes needed work after years of neglect. Beyond its then-rough exterior, Dr. Barbara Baggerly-Hinojosa and her husband, C.A., saw great potential.
Baggerly-Hinojosa was looking for a corporate office for her Leadership Empowerment Group. Hinojosa, a Mercedes native, encouraged his wife to look at the city as a Mid-Valley hub to grow her business. They would settle on 805 S. Missouri – the Acker House as people in Mercedes know it – as the home office for Leadership Empowerment in 2015.
Their shared vision has gone beyond initial expectations. Leadership Empowerment has used Mercedes – and the renovated Acker House – as home base to grow its business statewide and beyond. The consulting firm advises companies, nonprofit organizations and educational systems on ways to improve their leadership, team building and collaboration skills in managing staff.
“Being in Mercedes makes sense for us,” said Baggerly-Hinojosa, whose company also has offices in Waco and San Antonio. “We’re very proud to be from Mercedes. Part of our success comes from being based in the Rio Grande Valley. We’ve used it as an advantage for our company.”
It’s not only a corporate office location but home as well for Baggerly-Hinojosa and her husband. They reside in the same Mercedes neighborhood where the Acker House is located. For C.A., the two-story, beautifully renovated Acker House provides opportunities for visitors to see what his hometown has to offer.
“This is the vision my wife and I had when we took on the restoring of the Acker House,” said C.A. Hinojosa III, in a Facebook post, mentioning how Valley organizations have used Leadership Empowerment office space to host meetings and conferences. “To bring people from outside of Mercedes to see what we have to offer. We’ve had leaders from as far as Washington D.C. here to meet at the Acker House.”
Changing Business Landscape
A team of NASA’s top lawyers were recently convened to hear about the transformation of American workplaces since 2020.
Leading the discussion in late November at the emotional intelligence team-building session in Houston was Baggerly-Hinojosa. It’s the sort of training sessions that Leadership Empowerment has become known for. It has also earned Baggerly-Hinojosa recognition from the Small Business Administration as a business coach to train emerging leaders.
There is no topic more important in her view than helping company and business leaders to understand how workplace dynamics have changed since the economic challenges of 2020. From that year forward, Baggerly-Hinojosa said, workplace norms have changed. Workforces were separated from traditional office settings and remain so for many companies.
The script has been flipped in her assessment when it comes to traditional office workdays of 8 to 5. Zoom calls and remote interactions are now becoming more prevalent.
“The landscape of business and leadership has been turned upside down,” Baggerly-Hinojosa said. “Employees have much more power now. For years, the message from employers was, ‘you should be glad to have a job.’ That’s completely flipped today.”
The imperative now is retaining employees and not losing them to other employers who offer more flexibility and have open-minded approaches to maintaining work-personal life balance, she said.
“Leaders need the biggest toolbox they can find,” Baggerly-Hinojosa said of her work with companies of all sizes and types. “Mostly everyone needs to retool. We have to figure out new skill sets in how to lead in different ways.”
Still Rooted Locally
It’s noteworthy that a company from Mercedes that has been bold enough and sufficiently successful to land contracts with the likes of NASA is teaching such cutting-edge management skills.
Baggerly-Hinojosa’s Leadership Empowerment remains rooted in the Valley. The Acker House has been used as a staging ground to launch civic organizations like Leadership Mercedes. C.A. Hinojosa is the chief operating officer for Leadership Empowerment and also oversees the running of the Mercedes Enterprise, a community newspaper the Hinojosa couple owns and bases at the Acker House.
The revitalization of the historic Mercedes house is a source of great pride for the Hinojosas and how it has connected their company’s successes with their hometown pride and what it has to offer.
“Some of the bigger cities in the Valley have something like this and now Mercedes has one as well,” C.A. Hinojosa said in a YouTube video about the historic home. “If you have some kind of something, be it a talk, book signing or an art show, and Mercedes can benefit, we’ll talk about it.”