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 →