Steven Becerra for the NMSBDC

Cash is the most liquid of a business’s assets. Although cash isn’t obvious in a high-tech world where money mostly moves by debit and credit cards, wire transfers and other electronic transactions, the monetary standard of all these types of transactions is cash. Quiet as it’s kept, cash still rules the economy. It’s the easiest form of money that can be used to buy things, pay off debts or distribute capital.

Given that, business owners should have a basic understanding of cash flow and know how to ensure their businesses have sufficient cash to sustain current operations and ultimately create wealth for the owners and investors. And yet this most basic of business cycles is probably the most misunderstood — and sometimes woefully ignored — by business owners, who are vigilant about checking their account balances at the bank but fail to predict how much cash they have available at any given time to meet the needs of the business.

ABCs of cash flow:

The injection of cash — or sources of cash — come from four areas: investment, debt, sale of assets, and operating profits.

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Gena Wilimitis of the Securities Division of the NM Regulation & Licensing Dept.

The steep rise in credit card debt, short-term lending and personal bankruptcies underscore the need for more effective economic education if individuals are to be empowered to achieve financial security.  Without basic knowledge of how financial markets, credit, and investing work, individuals risk becoming victims of fraud and of making unsound investments.

A variety of financial education materials are available to educators, but it’s not always easy to get them in the right hands. The New Mexico Coalition for Financial Education is trying to change that.

Coordinating financial education efforts

The New Mexico Coalition for Financial Education is a voluntary association of educator businesses, government agencies and individuals who believe that the prosperity of our state requires economic and financial education. The coalition’s goal is to help all New Mexicans acquire the knowledge, skills, confidence and resources that can help them manage and improve their personal financial lives. The coalition formed more than four years ago to act as an umbrella group for all the financial literacy efforts under way statewide. What began as a loose network of individuals and organizations has developed into a formal organization with a board of directors and monthly board meetings. The coalition recently applied for nonprofit status.

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Jerry Pacheco, Executive Director, International Business Accelerator

New Mexicans are familiar with the stereotype about Mexican Americans and Hispanics — that people who have lived here for generations have the same tastes and preferences as recent arrivals from Mexico. But many of us are just as guilty of viewing Central and Latin American cultures as a homogeneous “Hispanic” mass, thus negating the rich diversity found in the customs and traditions of South and Central America.

Such generalizations are lethal to those of us who do business across national borders. The culturally insensitive businessperson risks offending the very people he wants to please and overlooks opportunities to market to various subgroups.

One size doesn’t fit all.

The simple tortilla illustrates how different traditions can be within a larger cultural group.

On my first visit to Mexico, I was surprised to be served a small corn tortilla rather than a large flour tortilla like those found in Northern New Mexico. My hosts stared when I tore the tortilla in half and put the remainder back in the tortilla container. When a member of this family later visited me in Northern New Mexico, it was my turn to be surprised when he grabbed a whole tortilla and put it on his plate.

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Deborah Gorenz, President, Hospital Services Corporation

Many small businesses view performance-excellence programs as too expensive and time-consuming to be worthwhile. My organization, Hospital Services Corporation, spent many years without a performance-excellence framework until we became involved with Quality New Mexico, a nonprofit organization that fosters and promotes performance excellence to all New Mexico businesses and organizations.

The New Mexico program is modeled on the performance-quality system pioneered by former commerce secretary

Malcolm Baldrige, which aims to help organizations enhance their competitiveness by delivering ever-improving value to customers and improving overall organizational performance. Every year, the president bestows the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award to businesses of all types and sizes and to education, health care and nonprofit organizations that have demonstrated outstanding performance in seven areas: leadership; strategic planning; customer and market focus; measurement, analysis, and knowledge management; workforce focus; process management; and results.

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Bruce Winchell, Registered Patent Attorney

Every business has some type of intellectual property, whether it’s a patent, copyright, trademark, trade name or trade secret. Intellectual property is what sets one business apart from another and gives it the kind of competitive advantage that attracts customers and investors.

The exclusive right to this property — the ownership of an idea or creation — is something an entrepreneur or inventor should take pains to protect.

The price of protection

Patents offer the most protection for technology-based business startups. They’re also a concern for serious investors who want assurances that a business’s intellectual-property rights are established and safe from infringement by competitors.

Patents are the most expensive of all intellectual properties. Over the 20-year life of a patent, U.S. Patent and Trademark Office fees run about $5,000, but lots more money is spent paying patent attorneys to prepare the documents that are necessary to retain and protect the patent. Attorney costs can be two to six times what the patent office charges.

While the cost of getting a patent in the U.S. is cheaper than almost anywhere else in the world, it can still be unaffordable to many entrepreneurs and inventors.

How to save money on legal fees

Patent law is complex enough to be the only legal specialty that requires a separate bar exam and a federal license to practice before the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. But entrepreneurs can save money by learning how to draft their own patent applications.

Having the inventor involved in the application improves the quality of the final documents because the inventor usually knows more than anyone else about what he or she has invented. The patent attorney can then review and complete the documents and file the patent application.

Technology Ventures Corporation offers frequent workshops on do-it-yourself patent applications. Individuals learn about patent laws and the latest case law pertaining to patent applications. They learn how to maximize the probability of being issued a patent, which often involves properly drafting claims — the parts of a patent that define the legal boundaries of an invention and aim to inoculate it from legal challenges. Claims — the numbered sentences at the end of a patent application — are detailed descriptions of every component or step involved in the creation of an apparatus, a technique or a design, among other inventions and innovations.

Jerry Pacheco, Executive Director, International Business Accelerator

Successful business people know that opportunities exist even in the most challenging times — and that includes opportunities for cross-border trade during a global economic crisis.

Many New Mexican companies learned this lesson the hard way in 1994. The North American Free Trade Agreement took effect that year, and many of the state’s businesses begin exporting their products to Mexico. When the devaluation of the peso crippled Mexico’s economy in December of that year, New Mexico’s trade with Mexico plummeted.

This spooked the New Mexico companies most unfamiliar with the effect that economic cycles have on the maquiladora industry, and many curtailed their efforts in Mexico. More experienced U.S. exporters from states such as Texas and Arizona worked with their Mexican buyers through the crisis and never gave up on their markets. When the economy turned around, these companies had enormously healthy business with Mexico. By contrast, only West Virginia and New Mexico — out of all the U.S. states — saw their overall trade with Mexico decrease during the first six years of NAFTA.

Relearning old lessons

Mexico’s maquiladora industry is heavily dependent on the world automotive industry, with firms such as Delphi Automotive, Visteon, Johnson Controls, Ford, Chrysler, Nissan and GM all major players south of the U.S. border. With the U.S. automobile industry in big trouble, many firms are suffering in Mexican industrial centers such as Juárez.

Given the sorry state of the world economy — along with fears of cross-border drug violence and the swine flu outbreak — organizers nearly scrapped plans for this year’s NAFTA Institute Supplier Meet the Buyer Trade Conference.

For the past six years, the border-trade conference has matched purchasing managers from Mexico’s maquiladora industry with U.S. suppliers of industrial products such as metals, plastic injection, resins and packaging in a series of business-to-business events. Last year’s conference drew 600 participants, but organizers worried that the triple whammy of recession-violence-pandemic would scare suppliers and producers away this year.

Instead organizers were flooded with calls and registrations. By the week of the conference, 43 maquiladora industry purchasing managers had promised to attend, each with a list of supplies they wanted to purchase, and more than 200 prospective suppliers had registered. When the conference was over, attendance approached 700 people representing more than 300 companies.

This outcome demonstrates the vitality of forward-looking businesses led by people who realize that a recession — for all the pain it causes — also presents enormous opportunities. Three years ago, it would have been nearly impossible to pitch a product to the purchasing manager of a major maquiladora. But today, these manufacturers are open to any product or service that will help them decrease costs and diversify.

The International Business Accelerator can help New Mexican businesses and individuals with some of the challenges associated with taking their product or service into the global market.

Learn more about the International Business Accelerator.

Download 96_Open for Business in Mexico PDF

Nina Anthony, SEO Consultant for WESST

Social media give businesses the opportunity to share knowledge and influence customers like never before. Unlike traditional, outbound marketing, in which businesses buy space in newspapers or airtime on television, the social Web offers an almost infinite number of free or low-cost distribution channels to directly reach and influence consumers.

Small businesses can participate in this increasingly social world of consumer-business mass collaboration in several ways.

Networking sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter let people connect with peers, customers and “influencers,” people who win a strong following of friends, fans and supporters by regularly submitting high-quality content to social media sites. Company-sponsored fan pages on Facebook allow businesses to stay current with customers and get instant feedback about products or services.

Blogs can create and maintain personal bonds with customers. Blogs with interesting content and regular updates attract inbound links, which draws search engines. A blog syndicated with an RSS feed automatically sends new posts to subscribers.

Writing and publishing original articles and online press releases optimized to attract search engines allows a company to share news about a service or product. It can be submitted to a free or subscription-based online newswire service to help build links and traffic to a business’s Web site. (Find article directories by googling “submit article.”)

Establishing a reputation on social news and bookmarking sites like Digg, StumbleUpon and Delicious can generate business for consultants and other professionals. These sites cater to a narrower topic- or industry-focused audience. Network members can submit original articles or share links to articles they think will resonate with the social community, but before they can promote their services, they must earn credibility in the community as “thought leaders.”

Videos are another vehicle for disseminating marketing messages online. According to February search engine numbers from comScore, video searches on YouTube now represent 25 percent of all Google search queries in the U.S. Businesses should weigh the benefits of hosting videos exclusively on their own sites to attract the most direct traffic versus uploading the videos on third-party sites like YouTube and MetaCafe where they might be seen by more people but divert traffic (and potential links) away from one’s Web site.

Every business should have a social media strategy based on the needs and interests of its customers. Success in social media and search engine optimization requires a long-term commitment to continually publish high-quality, relevant content that draws Internet attention.

WESST offers various low-cost workshops (as well as one-on-one consulting) to help small businesses leverage these powerful inbound marketing tactics.

Learn more about WESST

Download 94_How to Use Social Media in Business PDF