More Hispanice-owned businesses

Maggie Hernandez leads her Taefit group training class at Spectrum Athletic Club in Canoga Park, Thursday, Sept. 23, 2010. (Michael Owen Baker/Staff Photographer) Tony Castro in the Daily News.

When Maggi Hernandez's older daughter Ariana was 3, the youngster got the urge to take up tae kwon do - and her mom, a transplant from Connecticut to West Hills, tried to accommodate her.

"The martial arts studio we went to enroll her in didn't want to take her because she was so young," Hernandez recalls. "But I talked to them into taking her, and she was hooked - and soon so was I."

Soon, too, Hernandez decided to turn her own workout devotion into a full-time, seven-days-a-week business that in eight years has blossomed into a profitable physical fitness and nutrition-based enterprise with a solid San Fernando Valley following.