By Patricia West-Barker for Finance New Mexico

Unless you are an entrepreneur laboring alone in your garage, your company’s success may depend largely on the quality of the team you’ve assembled to conduct your business—whether that team is made up of two, 20 or 200 people.

To find out what makes high-performing teams tick, MIT’s Human Dynamics Laboratory monitored the communications of large numbers of people as they went about their work. The study, published in the Harvard Business Review in April 2012, found that “communication plays a critical role in building successful teams.” Face-to-face interactions (versus email, phone and text) were extremely important, as were the frequency of non-work related conversations. Continue reading →

By Finance New Mexico

Accounting is the lingua franca, or common tongue, that allows business owners in multilingual New Mexico to communicate no matter what language they speak at home.

A basic understanding of accounting principles allows entrepreneurs to take batches of numbers and translate them into easily comprehensible statements of performance and profitability. It helps them keep track of money as it enters and exits their coffers and make reasoned decisions based on what the numbers say. Continue reading →

By Finance New Mexico

A business plan is incomplete without a financial section that forecasts how the owner expects the company to grow and how much revenue he believes the company will generate based on his reading of the market for its products or services.

But unless that projection is grounded in reality, it won’t make the desired impression on a lender or investor — or even on a landlord who wants some assurance the business will last as long as the commercial lease. Continue reading →

By Claudia Infante, Projects Coordinator, New Mexico Manufacturing Extension Partnership

Any entrepreneur with a product idea or prototype can find someone to build it in New Mexico.

Two companies that do just that for a variety of clients are Marpac, a maker of devices that secure medical tubes and collars, and TEAM Technologies Inc., which designs and fabricates products that require advanced engineering and electronics.

Both Albuquerque companies opened their doors for New Mexico Manufacturing Day activities last fall and plan to participate again this year. Continue reading →

By Finance New Mexico

Anyone who operates a business in New Mexico is familiar with the gross receipts tax, or GRT — a tax not on sales but on companies and people who do business here.

Unlike a sales tax, the GRT is imposed on the seller of property or services. It is not a tax the seller collects from the buyer and delivers to the state; it’s due even if the seller doesn’t charge the buyer. Continue reading →

By Missy Galle, Operations Officer, Los Alamos National Bank

Major credit card processors are imposing tougher security measures on credit card issuers in the industry’s ongoing efforts to combat credit card fraud.

These global standards — called EMV for Europay, MasterCard and Visa, the companies collaborating on the new system — include embedding computer chips into “smart” credit cards that offer greater security for point of sale (POS) transactions than the magnetic strips on traditional credit cards.

Many chip-embedded cards require a personal identification number (PIN) instead of a signature to complete the POS transaction and close the security loop; these “chip-and-PIN” cards are the norm around the world, though they’ve been slow to catch on in the United States. Continue reading →

By Sandy Nelson, Finance New Mexico team member

Managing creative people can be confounding to business leaders who prefer order and structure. But learning how to manage or lead “creatives” is critical to recruiting and retaining the natural nonconformists whose unconventional ideas can lead to transformative products and services.

The trick is to balance a business’s need for on-time, on-budget work with the nonlinear thinker’s need for challenge, risk and meaning.

Some companies have famously figured out how to foster a culture of creativity and profitability, whether they’re producing forward-thinking commodities (think Apple and Samsung), services (Google, Facebook), business models (Virgin Group), operational designs (Southwest Airlines) or manufacturing processes (Toyota). Continue reading →