Les Mathews, Mesa Capital Partners
Business owners who obtain outside equity – whether from family, friends or institutional investors – quickly learn money has strings attached.
Most outside equity providers want to get repaid over a reasonable period of time and at a very good rate of return. In exchange for providing capital, they obtain a piece of the company, thereby becoming business partners.
John C. Woosley, District Director, SBA NM District Office
Janice Lucero was convinced people would pay a little more to renew their driver’s license or car registration if they could do it quickly from a convenient location with friendly service. Lucero turned her conviction into MVD Express, a $5 million company that serves 22,000 customers a month from its 11 New Mexico locations. Lucero’s success and community involvement led the U.S. Small Business Administration to name her the New Mexico Small Business Person of the Year. The award earned Lucero a trip to Washington D.C. where she’s in the running for national recognition.
The New Mexico district of the U.S. Small Business Administration will honor Lucero and other small-business leaders from 11:45 a.m. to 1:45 p.m. June 2 at the state’s Small Business Week Award Celebration luncheon at Embassy Suites Albuquerque Hotel, 1000 Woodward Place N.E.
Monica Abeita, Regional Development Corp. for Northern NM Connect
This year marks the tenth anniversary of the New Mexico Small Business Assistance program, created by the state Legislature in 2000 to provide technical help from Los Alamos and Sandia national laboratories to small businesses throughout the state.
At the 2011 NMSBA Innovation Celebration, held April 7 at the Indian Cultural Center in Albuquerque, laboratory officials recognized 12 small businesses that have participated in the program. The businesses are in both urban and rural communities of New Mexico, and include agricultural companies, medical technologies and an irrigation district.
Tom Stephenson, Managing General Partner, Verge Fund
Specialization is common within the equity investment world, with investors generally focused on specific stages of business development. A “seed” stage investor, for example, has a different specialty than a firm that provides expansion capital.
An entrepreneur who knows the terms used to describe development-related types of equity financing is more likely to seek the investor right for her venture and increase the chance of obtaining funds.
Most investor specialization terms fall close to the following:
Seed-stage venture capital refers to investments made in firms with products under development or recently introduced to the market. Continue reading
John C. Woosley, District Director, SBA NM District Office
Merlin Herbert believes anyone can run a business if they have the right training. Herbert, the owner of a 19 year-old Bloomfield-based welding company, participated in the e200 Emerging Leaders training program in Gallup last year. “The training helped me become a better manager,” he says.
An initiative of the U.S. Small Business Administration, the e200 Emerging Leaders Program is a national curriculum that provides business owners in underserved markets with training, networking, resources and motivation to grow their business and create jobs. Now in its fourth year in Albuquerque, the program will be offered in Farmington this year for the first time. The training, which is valued at over $8,000, is free of charge and will be conducted from April through November, 2011, in both locations.
Tom Stephenson, Managing General Partner, Verge Fund
Anyone looking for a business investor must examine their personal goals before looking for funding – different reasons for starting a business mean different ways of finding money.
Venture capitalists classify entrepreneurial businesses into two groups: growth businesses and lifestyle, or legacy, businesses. Only growth businesses will be attractive to venture-capital firms.
Lifestyle businesses are those started by people who want to have control over what they do and how they spend their time. These businesses tend to be focused on a local market, and entrepreneurs expect to own and run the business indefinitely. Continue reading
Betsy Gillette, Director of Market Research & Planning, TVC
A business trying to market an industrial product has a smaller customer base than one selling mass-market products, which means the entrepreneur must capitalize on each sales opportunity by investing in market research.
Industrial customers do not buy on whim and generally have a structured buying process. An entrepreneur with a product he believes customers will want needs to know what problems potential customers must solve and how they’re currently solving them. What machinery does the client use? What manual processes are involved? How much does this cost (not just labor and supplies but lower production or revenues, environmental penalties or other costs)? Many industrial customers simply want to do things faster and more efficiently.