By Finance New Mexico
Planning in business isn’t just a matter of deciding how to assign capital and resources to create a profitable venture. Equally essential is developing a distance vision.
The most effective business leaders are planners and visionaries with creative, dynamic and specific ideas about where they want their company to be three years or five years from now. Their focus is “macro” and “micro”: Continue reading
By Kristelle Siarza, Online Account Executive, The Garrity Group Public Relations
It’s not enough to have a physical presence in a world where business is conducted around the planet and around the clock. The most competitive businesses operate in cyberspace as well, because that’s where their customers are — shopping, researching, discussing and buying.
New Mexico residents turn increasingly to digital resources when seeking out all types of information. According to the most recent (2013) annual Garrity Perception Survey, New Mexicans use television as a news and information source 58 percent of the time, newspaper 39 percent of the time and internet news sites 29 percent of the time. Those sources are followed by radio (28 percent), internet blogs (17 percent) and social networking sites (17 percent). When internet news sources, blogs and social media are combined, New Mexico residents turn to digital sources 63 percent of the time, Continue reading
By Jocelyn Barrett, Attorney at Law, Montgomery & Andrews, P.A.
There are many circumstances under which an employee and employer part ways. An employee can choose to leave a job, or the company may make a unilateral decision to end the employment relationship. Whatever the case, the separation should be documented in writing to protect both parties.
For the employee’s benefit, a separation agreement should detail in writing what the employer intends to provide at the parting. These might include the final paycheck, severance pay, pay-out of unused vacation or sick time and/or any continuation of coverage under the company’s health-care plan.
For the employer, an agreement can help protect against some potential lawsuits and clarify what the employee agreed to provide the company when hired. Continue reading
By Karen Converse, New Mexico MEP
After 32 years as president of Jack’s Plastic Welding, Jack Kloepher wanted to see if his company was ready to begin exporting three of its most promising products: stand-up inflatable paddle boards and pontoon boats for recreationists, and rapid deployable spill containment units for the oil and gas industry.
So Kloepher and partner Errol Baade enrolled in the ExporTech class offered by New Mexico Manufacturing Extension Partnership in collaboration with the New Mexico Economic Development Department and other partners.
By Finance New Mexico
To stand out in a market saturated with consumer products and get the attention of consumers deluged with advertising appeals, an entrepreneur needs to offer a product or service with obvious benefits and unquestionable superiority over the competition.
That isn’t as easy as it sounds. The history of U.S. commerce is littered with countless products whose inventors misjudged the market’s appetite or need.
By Scott Gray, D’Ann L. Brown Customs Broker
International trade supports about 218,000 jobs in New Mexico — about one in five jobs — at companies of all sizes, according to the New Mexico-based Business Roundtable. While exports bring money to New Mexico producers in an obvious way, imports also bring money to the state by supplying materials that keep the state’s manufacturers and retailers competitive.
In 2010, 1,056 New Mexico companies imported products to sell or use in manufacturing. Nearly 64 percent of these importers were small businesses with fewer than 20 employees. Continue reading
By Finance New Mexico
Businesses use many tools to keep projects and production on track, and most have used one or another of these with varying degrees of success.
The critical path method is the result of a mathematical approach to decision-making in project management, but it can be used to set deadlines for any business endeavor that includes multiple interdependent tasks. The critical path lists every task on a project trajectory and defines which are mandatory and which are more flexible.
By Stacy Sacco, associate director, UNM Small Business Institute
When the time came for Albuquerque’s Bosque School to write a three- to five-year strategic plan, it was only natural that the progressive private school would choose to work with students from another innovative environment — the Small Business Institute of the University of New Mexico’s Anderson School of Management.
“We’re an institution that focuses on thinking outside the norm,” said William Handmaker, head of school at Bosque, where students in grades 6 to 12 prepare for higher education. “Instead of going the regular route, here was the chance to work with UNM.”
By Andrea Holling, New Mexico MEP
Dennis Grubb will tell you that partnering with the New Mexico Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP) was one of the best business decisions he ever made — not counting the decision to move his solar products business, Solaro Energy, from California to New Mexico.
Within a year of building a production facility in a business park just outside Socorro, the solar industry veteran had doubled productivity at the plant where his company’s solar powered attic fans and electronic skylights are assembled. He had outgrown his original space, requiring the construction of two more buildings.
Grubb, who designed and engineered every Solaro innovation, applauds the business-friendly environment in New Mexico Continue reading
By Senator Blanche Lincoln, Chairwoman, It’s My Business coalition
Solo entrepreneurs — some of whom are independent contractors, others just one-person companies with no employees — make up 77 percent of New Mexico’s businesses, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2007 Small Business Survey, and they generate about $4.5 billion in revenue each year.
While at least part of the revenue generated by independent contractors is subject to New Mexico’s gross receipts tax, companies that engage independent contractors are exempt from collecting and paying payroll taxes that would be required if the contractors were classified as employees.