Sofia Reyes keeps a color-coded spreadsheet on the second monitor in her office. Seventy-three rows, eighteen columns, conditional formatting in three shades of green and one unforgiving red. It is a grant tracker, and it is the closest thing she has to a business partner. Every deadline she has ever missed, every application she has ever lost, every narrative paragraph she has reused across six funded awards — it is all there, time-stamped and searchable.
Today, Reyes runs Casa del Sol, a bilingual catering and events company operating out of a 3,800-square-foot commissary kitchen in central Phoenix, Arizona. She employs fourteen people, books $1.2 million in annual revenue, and services multi-venue events across the Phoenix metro — weddings, nonprofit galas, and corporate contracts with two of Arizona’s largest healthcare systems. Between 2021 and 2024, she stacked $147,500 across six grants to build the business without giving up a single point of equity.
This is how she did it, in order, with receipts.
The Business Before the Grants
Reyes spent eleven years in restaurant management before she started Casa del Sol in 2020. She ran the back of house at a regional hotel group in Phoenix, then moved into catering operations at a James Beard-recognized restaurant group in Scottsdale. By the time she left, she knew every line on a catering P&L and had a rolodex of event planners who trusted her.
She launched in March 2020 — the single worst month in the history of the American events industry. Her first six months of “business” were cooking family meals for healthcare workers at Banner Health, billed at cost plus fifteen percent. It kept the lights on.
Reyes bootstrapped the real launch on $18,000 in personal savings and a $22,000 friends-and-family round from three former coworkers and one aunt. She paid them back in eighteen months. By the end of 2020, Casa del Sol had done $94,000 in revenue, most of it healthcare meal programs, some of it socially distanced micro-weddings.
She did not have the collateral for a bank loan. She did not have the credit history to qualify for meaningful working capital. What she had was a laptop, a commercial kitchen sublease, and the hours between 9 p.m. and 1 a.m. after service.
That was when she started writing grants.
Grant #1 — The $5,000 That Proved She Could Win (2021)
Reyes’s first successful application was an IFundWomen Universal Grant for $5,000, awarded in May 2021. The application was three essay questions and a two-minute video. She spent nine evenings on it.
The money itself was not transformative. It bought a second convection oven and covered a food handler certification program for her three part-time staff. But the grant mattered for a different reason: it broke the psychological ceiling.
“Until that first yes, I was writing applications like I was begging. After it, I was writing like I had already been chosen once.” — Sofia Reyes
She has gone back to IFundWomen twice since for smaller awards. She did not win either time. She kept applying anyway.
The lesson she codified after grant one: apply to the small ones first, not because the money is meaningful, but because the narrative you develop — the founder story, the impact framing, the budget — becomes a reusable asset you will copy-paste into every application after it.
Grant #2 — The $10,000 BIPOC-Focused Award (Early 2022)
In February 2022, Reyes won a Comcast RISE grant, one of the corporate programs designed specifically for BIPOC-owned small businesses. The award came in two parts: $10,000 in cash and a package of marketing and technology services she valued at roughly $8,000.
She used the cash to buy a used refrigerated transport van. The in-kind marketing services rebuilt her website and produced a professional photography library she still uses in 2026 applications.
The application was harder than IFundWomen’s. It required two years of financials, a detailed use-of-funds breakdown, and references from two non-family stakeholders. The review process took eleven weeks.
Reyes points to this grant as the inflection point. Winning a corporate-backed, competitive award put Casa del Sol on a different tier of legitimacy — one that state and federal reviewers took seriously the following year. It is also roughly when she began treating grants as a distinct funding channel rather than a supplement to a loan she could not get.
For context on why that matters: according to the 2026 funding gap data, Latina-owned businesses receive a fraction of a percent of institutional venture dollars, and women-owned firms as a whole capture roughly 2% of small business loan volume relative to their share of the business population. Grants are not a feel-good side quest in that landscape. For many founders, they are the primary non-dilutive path to capital.
Grant #3 — The $25,000 State-Level Grant (Late 2022)
In October 2022, Reyes won a $25,000 small business recovery grant administered through the Arizona Commerce Authority’s workforce and economic development arm. This was the largest single check she had ever received, and it was earmarked for equipment and workforce training.
She used $18,000 on a commercial-grade walk-in cooler installation and $7,000 on ServSafe certification and bilingual kitchen-management training for five staff members.
State grants, she learned, are an underused channel. Most founders chasing grants think first of federal portals and corporate programs. But every state has a commerce department, an economic development authority, or a workforce agency with dedicated funding for small businesses — particularly those in industries the state is trying to grow.
Phoenix’s hospitality and tourism economy is one of Arizona’s largest employment sectors. That was not a coincidence her application ignored.
“I stopped writing grants about my business and started writing grants about the state’s problem that my business solves. That is when the checks got bigger.” — Sofia Reyes
Grant #4 — The $30,000 Federal Pathway (Early 2023)
By spring 2023, Reyes was ready for federal money. She briefly considered SBIR — the Small Business Innovation Research program — and realized within a week it was the wrong fit. SBIR is built for R&D-heavy technology and life-sciences firms. A catering company, however sophisticated, is not going to win one.
What did fit: a USDA Rural Business Development Grant, accessed through a partnership she built with a cooperative farm network in Pinal County, about an hour south of Phoenix. Casa del Sol had begun sourcing produce from small rural growers and catering agritourism events in the region. That partnership made her eligible for a rural-tied federal program most urban-based founders never see.
The grant came in at $30,000 and was administered through a regional USDA office. The application was the most complex she had ever submitted — eight distinct sections, third-party letters of support, and a detailed economic impact model.
She won it in March 2023, eleven weeks after submission.
Two things made it possible. First, she used the federal grant portal at Grants.gov to identify the opportunity early and track the submission deadline with thirty days of buffer. Second, she leveraged a free consultation with a local Minority Business Development Agency (MBDA) Business Center — a network of centers funded by the Minority Business Development Agency that provides grant-writing and capital-access support for minority-owned firms.
The MBDA counselor reviewed her draft narrative twice before submission. Reyes credits that review with the award.
Grant #5 — The $15,000 Industry-Specific Grant (Mid-2023)
In July 2023, Reyes won a $15,000 grant from the National Restaurant Association Educational Foundation, earmarked for workforce development and professional certification in the food service industry.
This was a targeted application. Industry-specific grants are smaller, more competitive for the founders who know about them, and significantly less competitive against the broader pool of every small business in the country. She used the funds to enroll herself and her sous chef in a culinary business management certification program and to subsidize English-as-a-second-language tutoring for two kitchen staff working toward supervisory roles.
The lesson she reinforced at this stage: industry-specific grants are gatekept by industry associations, not by generic grant-finder sites. To find them, she joined two restaurant industry associations, subscribed to three trade newsletters, and followed the communications directors of the major food-industry foundations on LinkedIn. That is where the opportunities actually circulate.
The Small Business Administration’s grants page is a reasonable starting point for federal awareness, but industry-specific grants rarely show up there. They live inside the industries they serve.
Grant #6 — The $50,000 Equity-Focused Foundation Grant (2024)
In April 2024, Reyes won a $50,000 grant from a women-of-color-focused foundation fellowship — she names it on background only, but it sits in the tier of programs associated with organizations like the Tory Burch Foundation Fellows program and the Fearless Fund’s grant vehicles. (Reyes notes that the funding landscape for Black women founders shifted materially after the 2024 Fearless Fund litigation, and many programs restructured or paused; founders in 2026 should verify current eligibility through the Tory Burch Foundation and the National Women’s Business Council before spending application hours.)
The $50,000 was the capstone of the stack. It funded the commissary buildout that moved Casa del Sol out of a shared kitchen and into its own 3,800-square-foot facility in central Phoenix. Combined with a small equipment lease, it was enough to take the business from high-six-figures to seven-figure annual revenue inside eighteen months.
When Sofia was ready to add working-capital debt on top of the grant stack for a second van and a second prep team, she evaluated SBA lenders and alternative funding partners like Lendesca to understand the debt service coverage thresholds different lenders applied to catering businesses. She is strategic about the order of operations: grants first, then credit, then debt. In her words, the order is the strategy.
The System She Built
Reyes does not believe in inspiration when it comes to grants. She believes in operations.
She maintains a single master narrative document — a living six-page file — that contains every founder story paragraph, impact statement, budget justification, and reference quote she has ever refined. When a new application opens, she does not start from scratch. She copies the modules she needs, adjusts the framing to the funder’s priorities, and saves eight to twelve hours per application.
She tracks deadlines ninety days out in her spreadsheet. She submits everything at least seven days before the deadline. She keeps every rejection letter in a folder labeled “Data” — because, as she puts it, every no is information about what the reviewer wanted and did not see.
She also built a relationship with a grant writer she pays on a per-application retainer for awards above $25,000. The math on that is straightforward: a freelance grant writer who has already placed awards with the funder in question charges roughly $1,500 to $3,000 per application and improves her win rate measurably. At the $50,000 tier, the ROI is obvious.
For founders who want the full version of this operating playbook — the templates, the timelines, the specific databases she monitors — our grant strategy playbook walks through it in detail.
What She’d Do Differently
Reyes has two regrets.
First, she waited too long to build business credit in parallel with grants. Grants funded the growth, but the absence of a business credit profile meant she could not access working-capital lines when she needed them in 2023 and 2024. If she were starting over, she would be building business credit from day one, even while the grants were doing the heavy lifting.
Second, she underestimated the emotional tax of rejection. She applied to twenty-nine grants to win six. That is a 21% hit rate, which is actually strong by grant-application standards, but it means she absorbed twenty-three rejections over three years. If she could go back, she would have built a support network earlier — peer founders who were also applying, so she had people who understood what it felt like to lose grant six in a row.
For founders hitting the wall from a different direction — bank and SBA denials — the loan denial playbook covers that parallel journey. Reyes recommends reading both; capital strategy is rarely single-channel.
What Comes Next
Casa del Sol will open a second commissary location in Tucson in early 2027. Reyes is not applying for grants to fund it. The cash flow of the Phoenix operation and a straightforward equipment loan will cover most of it.
She is, however, still maintaining the spreadsheet. Seventy-three rows is going to become a hundred before the end of the year. She has three open applications in review and two more she is drafting this month, not because she needs the money but because the system she built works — and because somewhere in her pipeline is a founder she is mentoring who is going to need the narrative templates she is still refining.
For more profiles in this series, including operators working through SBA denials, equity rounds, and CDFI-backed expansions, see more founder stories.
“The grants did not build Casa del Sol. The system I built around the grants built Casa del Sol. That is a distinction every founder needs to understand before she writes her first application.” — Sofia Reyes
Casa del Sol is based in Phoenix, Arizona. Sofia Reyes is a composite founder profile created to illustrate real grant-stacking strategies and timelines faced by women business owners. All financial figures, grant amounts, and timelines are representative of real-world grant funding experiences.
Additional resources: Grants.gov · SBA Grants · Minority Business Development Agency · National Women’s Business Council · IFundWomen