For years, Erika Gonzalez Harrison ran parts of her first company, Eridion Glass, the way many small business owners do: spreadsheets, manual processes and hours spent keeping track of information that lived in too many different places.

This year, she decided to change that.

Harrison sat down with Claude and started building.

First came an order tracker. Then she built out the company’s Profit First system, including its accounts, allocations, weekly transfers and other financial processes.

There was no technical background behind the experiment.

“I want to be clear that I am not a developer,” Harrison says. “My very first attempt wouldn’t even load because I’d named the file index.html.html.”

Within about two weeks, however, Harrison says Eridion Glass was running on software she had built herself.

More important than the software was what happened to her time.

“The busywork stopped eating away at my time, and for the first time in years I had room to think,” she says.

That room helped Harrison do something much bigger: build a second company.

From Founder to Founder-Educator

Harrison launched Quinta & Co. around two areas she believes women business owners need: the fundamentals of running a business and practical experience using AI to make that business work better.

The idea had been with her for more than a decade. Her experience building Eridion Glass showed her exactly what she wanted Quinta to address.

Before becoming an entrepreneur, Harrison earned an undergraduate degree and went to business school. She then spent 20 years in advertising, managing account P&Ls for brands including Gatorade, Allstate and Bank of America.

And yet, when she became a founder, she didn’t know how to form an LLC.

“All that education, and nobody had ever taught me the part where you actually start, run and grow the thing,” Harrison says.

Some of those lessons came at a cost.

She learned about Texas franchise tax after discovering that even though her company didn’t owe the tax, it was still required to file a report. She says the company lost its sales license.

She also learned the value of building relationships after spending too much of her early entrepreneurial journey working alone.

“Not networking cost me thousands of dollars,” she says. “Real money. Contracts I didn’t hear about, contacts I didn’t have, mistakes somebody would have talked me out of over coffee for free.”

Her assessment now is succinct:

“I thought staying heads-down was discipline. It was just isolation with better branding.”

Those experiences helped shape The Foundations, the part of Quinta focused on the practical mechanics of running a business. Classes are taught by women who are both practitioners and founders themselves. Harrison’s attorney teaches contracts. Her bookkeeper teaches bookkeeping. An HR practitioner teaches hiring.

“I don’t teach anything at Quinta that I haven’t already built or done inside my own company first,” Harrison says.

“For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to build something that helps women — not just to start a business they love, but to truly thrive at it, and to skip the expensive, lonely mistakes I made simply because I didn’t know what I didn’t know. Quinta & Co. is that something.” – Erika Gonzalez Harrison

Making AI Practical

The other side of Quinta, The Practice, focuses on helping women build real tools with AI.

Harrison’s approach starts with a business owner’s existing workload rather than the technology itself.

“We don’t start with AI,” she says. “We start with a problem she already has — the spreadsheet she rebuilds every Monday, the invoices she chases by hand — and we fix that one thing in the room.”

It’s the same approach she used inside Eridion Glass.

Her advice for figuring out where to begin?

“Automate the thing you hate first.”

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For Harrison, automating repetitive work did more than save a few hours. She says the financial system she built now gives her a clearer picture of where the company stands at any given time.

“I stopped guessing about money,” she says. “I know exactly where we stand on any given Tuesday, and that changed how I make every other decision.”

The Goal Is to Build It Yourself

One of Harrison’s favorite moments at Quinta happens during its second AI module.

Participants build a tool and then push it live online.

“She built software,” Harrison says. “Two hours ago she’d have told you she isn’t technical.”

Harrison says someone once told her that moment could cost Quinta future sales. Once a participant realizes she can build something herself, she may also realize she doesn’t need someone else to do it for her.

Harrison doesn’t see that as a problem.

“I really don’t care,” she says. “It’s the entire reason for Quinta in one moment.”

That independence is central to what she wants women to leave with.

“Proof. Not a feeling — evidence,” Harrison says. “She built something, it works, it’s live, and she can show it to somebody.”

As Quinta opens enrollment for its fall semester, Harrison is keeping her ambitions geographically focused. She wants to build more resources for women entrepreneurs in Texas, including workshops, speaker series, retreats and scholarships.

“I’d rather be deeply useful in Texas than vaguely available everywhere,” she says.

And ultimately, she says Quinta’s success isn’t measured by how long a woman needs it.

It’s what she can do next without it.

“If a woman takes one class and then files her own entity, wins her own contract, builds her own tool — that’s it,” Harrison says. “That’s the whole business. Mission accomplished.”

MEET THE Fall/Winter 2026 Quinta & Co. Faculty

Learn more about Quinta & Co. and upcoming enrollment at quintaand.co

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