March 27, 2017

Meet Teo Martinez of Growing Generations in Miracle Mile

Local Stories

Today we’d like to introduce you to Teo Martinez.

Teo, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
Growing Generations began in 1996, specifically poised to help members of the LGBT community become parents through surrogacy. Mostly this included gay couples and gay single men. At the time, “traditional” surrogacy was the norm, which meant that the surrogate was also the provider of the eggs, a.k.a. biologically related to the baby. Most gay men wanted a greater freedom to choose their egg contributor, especially with gay male couples, where one partner might contribute sperm and the other wanted greater freedom to choose an egg donor that better matched his characteristics. So, we moved to “gestational surrogacy” and added an egg donor agency.

The thing with egg donation and, well, surrogacy too, at the time was the process was mired in old school thinking. Basically, a group of professionals got together 30 years ago and said this is how surrogacy and egg donation should be. Granted they were creating it from the paradigm of the time, but it was still much too narrow for what was to come. We knew that if we switched from the surrogate being the biological “mother”, a genetic link for the child to be able to access in some way, to a model where the child might never know or meet the egg donor that helped create him, clients needed some kind of access to the donor, while still maintaining anonymity. So, we started by providing real and candid videos of all of our donors, which clients could and still can download when they have achieved a birth that donor.

Around 1999, Growing Generations and the industry as a whole grew quite rapidly. We were helping the LGBT community, as well as the heterosexual community. It was not an issue for us to help straight couples and singles, it was just an expansion of our mission and vision. But because we had created such a thorough process for our gay clients, it was very easy for us to help heterosexual clients because mostly they had far less restrictions placed on them by the medical and legal industries, and frankly society.

In 2006, a new technology emerged in the United States that allowed HIV+ men to become biological parents through IVF. GG was one of the very few, if only agency, that immediately embraced this breakthrough and welcomed HIV+ men to become parents through its program. We eventually created our own company to provide this service directly to our clients and anyone else who needed it. Since then more than 200 babies have been born to parents with HIV through our process.

In 2012 we reached baby 1000, and actually in 2017 we reached baby 1500.

Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
We faced many obstacles along the way for sure. We have experienced medical professionals not wanting to work with our LGBT clients. We watched 30% of our business disappear overnight in 2008, spending the next couple years re-developing the company completely and questioning every internal office supply order, “Do you really need Kleenex? There is toilet paper in the bathroom.”

Running a small business, like sailing in a small boat, you feel every wave and gust of wind. There were times when we weren’t sure whether the company would make it. Today that feels like several lifetimes away. I mean, I still maintain a good deal of paranoia. We have had great year after great year since 2011. But the minute Jan 1 comes back around, my head screams “How are we going to do this again?!”.

Alright – so let’s talk business. Tell us about Growing Generations – what should we know?
Growing Generations provides surrogacy and egg donations services, as well as sperm processing for HIV+ men. We are what you call a full service agency, meaning that we provide all of the services, including access and referrals to outside professional services that we do not offer ourselves (legal, medical, psychological, etc.).

Growing Generations is known for its surrogates and customer service. We have set a high bar for women who wish to become surrogates. For example, we receive about 20,000 applications per year from potential surrogate candidates and we take less than 1%. Our admissions and screening process is extremely tough to pass.

As for customer service, we actually have staff dedicated to making sure that each and every employee is living by our service model. We have 12 different service values that we live by, in addition to an Employee Promise and steps by which we implement our service values daily. As the CEO of the company, one of my main focuses is that we continually improve upon our customer service.

The thing I am most proud of our company is the staff. We have staff in Los Angeles and in a small town in West Virginia called Wheeling. You would be hard pressed to find two more different places, but we have one culture that unites both offices seamlessly. I look forward to going to the office because our staff love what they do. Helping people have babies is wonderful and humbling, but it is our staff that keeps me coming back.

Is there a characteristic or quality that you feel is essential to success?
Maintaining flexibility. To use the sailing analogy again, the benefit of being in a small boat is that you are able to move quickly and sharply. It is the same with our small business. While we are one of the biggest agencies in the world, we operate in a way that allows us to quickly respond to business issues, changes in the industry and opportunity. A nice byproduct of this is that we stay fresh by constantly asking ourselves whether this is where we want to be, or is that the direction we want to go.

Pricing: