By Finance New Mexico

SBI client with UNM Anderson students and UNM professor Dr. Raj Mahto; courtesy UNM Anderson School of Management website

Albuquerque transplant Chris Mayo was 47 when he decided to ditch social work and build his chimney sweep/masonry/handyman sideline into a full-time business. Within a decade, Amrak Enterprises was growing by 30 percent each year and Mayo was paying a subcontractor to help with the workload and aiming to compete with the city’s top chimney-cleaning company.

“I’m 57 years old and need to position myself to either sell the business and be a silent partner or manage a fleet of chimney sweeps,” Mayo told Finance New Mexico. To help him prepare for the future, Mayo took the advice of his friend Dimitri Kapelianis, associate professor of marketing at the University of New Mexico School of Management. Continue reading →

New Mexico Angels President John Chavez at the 2016 Angel Capital Summit in Denver; photo courtesy New Mexico Angels

By Finance New Mexico

The folks at WESST never stop thinking of new ways to help small businesses succeed and thus strengthen New Mexico’s economy.

The 27-year-old nonprofit’s newest partnership is with New Mexico Angels — a 501(c)6 organization that, besides its educational and promotional mission, acts as an intermediary between its members and early stage businesses that present promising investment opportunities.

NMA (www.NMAngels.com) has been around since 1999. Just this year the organization began hosting office hours from 3 to 5 p.m. on the first Monday of each month at the WESST Enterprise Center in Albuquerque so entrepreneurs can seek information and advice about financing and angel investing. Continue reading →

Left to right: Armando Soto (in Orange sweatshirt) of Relios, Phillip Vanderwall of MARPAC, Kent Dahlinger of Relios and Christina McGrady of La Puerta Originals; photo courtesy Visual Lean Institute

By Finance New Mexico

Armando Soto is a convert to the visual-workplace concept. The director of operational excellence at Albuquerque jewelry-maker Relios Inc. attended a two-day workshop this spring that was sponsored by the New Mexico Manufacturing Extension Partnership. He came away with the tools he needed to put Relios on the path to being a fully functional visual workplace.

The point of visual-workplace training, according to guest speaker Gwendolyn Galsworth, Ph.D., founder of the Visual-Lean Institute, is to “convert the physical (work) environment into a visual one” and “to share vital information about the task at hand at a glance, without speaking a word — in short, to let the workplace speak.” Continue reading →

By Finance New Mexico

New Mexico entrepreneurs who want to start a business or take an existing venture to the next level need a model that allows the business to “scale up” — to improve profitability as demand increases for its product or service.

A scalable model attracts more investors because it equips the business to adapt to a larger market without significantly increasing its costs. And that has a positive impact on economic development in New Mexico, where a home-grown business that’s prepared for exponential growth brings more out-of-state money home. Continue reading →

John Campbell

By Lawrence M. Wells and John S. Campbell, attorneys at Montgomery & Andrews, P.A.

A ruling by the New Mexico Court of Appeals this spring over homeowners’ rights to keep chickens as pets, despite a community covenant restriction against keeping poultry, has ramifications for property owners, including those in business condominium associations and other business developments.

The appellate court in March reversed a 2014 trial court decision that Eldorado residents who kept chickens as pets in their backyards violated the community’s covenants against raising poultry. It did so on the grounds that the covenant language was ambiguous enough to be interpreted in more than one way, and should be interpreted expansively. Continue reading →

Marisa Jimenez at Santa Fe Studios

By Finance New Mexico

Marisa Xochtl Jimenez hasn’t lived in New Mexico for long, but the director of operations for Santa Fe Studios is already passionate about bringing jobs to the state.

Her area of expertise is film production; she manages one of the nation’s most prolific independent film studios and is part of the management team of MBS3, a global equipment services and management company associated with the film industry. Jimenez sees abundant opportunities for gung-ho, flexible, friendly and dependable New Mexico entrepreneurs to prosper in this growing industry if they’re willing to accommodate its nontraditional needs and long hours.

“New Mexico has welcomed the film industry with rebates and tax incentives since the 1990s,” Jimenez said. “And although we have world-class facilities, we still need to continue to train, grow and develop in order to remain a competitive state for productions to want to film in New Mexico.” Continue reading →

The Mixing Bowl; photo courtesy Rio Grande Cuisine

By Finance New Mexico

Creativity is simmering at commercial-kitchen incubators in New Mexico, and leaders in the food-based-business movement want to turn the heat up under this promising economic-development sector.

Chris Madrid, director of economic development for Rio Arriba County, sees food-based entrepreneurism as a way to reverse population loss and economic decline in the state’s rural areas — and to offset “leakage” of money to other states that produce more than 90 percent of the food consumed in New Mexico. Continue reading →

By Eddie Ho, Chief Information Officer at Los Alamos National Bank

The Department of Homeland Security in 2004 deemed October as National Cyber Security Awareness Month — a time to raise public consciousness about the ever-more-sophisticated ways in which criminals are trying to steal from working people, businesses and the financial institutions in which they put their money for safekeeping.

But financial institutions think about this problem 365 days a year. Banks invest enormous resources to protect individual and commercial customers from financial security breaches.

Financial institutions have strengthened cybersecurity defenses by embedding chips into credit and debit cards and requiring customers to use two-part authentication to access accounts and bank online. Los Alamos National Bank has used two-factor authentication for all online banking access for many years. Continue reading →