cash consultant flow usa
Thu, 29 Jul 2010 23:06:46 -0400 - Posted in sabre travel consultant
My first story today is from Washington state reader S.A. In a new edition of The Black Swan, author Nassim Nicholas Taleb warns against depending “on financial assets as a repository of value”. No!!! Really!!! Who would have thought that, dear reader. The man has a keen grasp of the obvious. The story is posted over at businessweek.com… and the headline reads “Taleb: Government Deficits Could Be the Next ‘Black Swan’“… and the link is here.
The next story is courtesy of reader ‘David’. The story, posted over atfoxbusiness.com, starts out like this… “So much for transparency. Under a little-noticed provision of the recently passed financial-reform legislation, the Securities and Exchange Commission no longer has to comply with virtually all requests for information releases from the public, including those filed under the Freedom of Information Act. The headline reads “SEC Says New Financial Regulation Law Exempts it From Public Disclosure“. Welcome to the U.S.S.A… Komrade! The link to the video… and the article… is here. It’s worth the listen… and the read.
Here’s a story [courtesy of reader Roy Stephens] about China that was posted over at the German website spiegel.de yesterday. I wasn’t seriously considering running with this piece, but changed my mind long before I got through reading this 2-page essay. I was impressed by the candor of the article… and I’m sure you will be as well, dear reader. The headline reads “The Dragon’s Embrace: China’s Soft Power Is a Threat to the West“… and the link is here.
My next story is another offering from reader Roy Stephens… and is your first [and only] must read of the day. It’s an Ambrose Evans-Pritchard piece that was filed very early this morning in London. It appears that European banks have amassed €30 trillion in liabilities and face a serious funding threat over the next two years as authorities withdraw emergency support, according to a new report by Standard & Poor’s. The headline reads “Europe’s €30 trillion headache“… and the link is here.
Here’s an interest chart that was sent to me yesterday. It was imbedded in a story that I decided [for length reasons] not to post in this column. But the chart is worth looking at… as it’s an eye-opener. Pay particular attention to the GDPs of China and the U.S.A. for the last 500 years. Amazing, isn’t it?
Lastly today is a radio interview with Goldmoney founder and GATA consultant James Turk. It’s about the death of government currencies, with emphasis on the experience of Weimar Germany. The interview is posted atradio.goldseek.com… and is about 20 minutes long and the link is here.
The US Constitution - Article 1 Section 10 – No State shall enter into any Treaty, Alliance, or Confederation; grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal; coin Money; emit Bills of Credit; make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts; pass any Bill of Attainder, ex post facto Law, or Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts, or grant any Title of Nobility.
Yesterday was just another day off the calendar, as the bullion banks picked away at the gold and silver prices. Silver’s 200-day moving average is thoroughly broken to the downside… and we’re inching ever closer to the 200-day moving average in gold. Every ’slice of the salami’ [as Ted Butler calls it] strengthens the Commitment of Traders report even further… and here’s hoping that all of Tuesday’s crucifixion will be in it when the report becomes available tomorrow afternoon. Wednesday’s activity won’t show up until the following Friday.
Here’s the 6-month gold graph that shows how JPMorgan et al are doing relative to the 200-day moving average.
Name: Augusto Sanabria
Occupation: President/CEO, Hispanic Business Initiative Fund, HBIF
Age: 30
Family: Lives with wife, Maria, and children, Emma, 1, and Juan Pablo, 8 months.
Place of residence: Windermere, Fl
Origin: Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina; raised in San Salvador, El Salvador; living in Orlando for 11 years.
As president of the Hispanic Business Initiative Fund, Augusto Sanabria manages a staff of ten people who work with Spanish-speaking entrepreneurs trying to start or grow their businesses. The nonprofit receives almost half of its $1 million in funding from government sources, as the State of Florida, the City of Orlando, Orange County and Osceola County join to supplement corporate donations and fundraising efforts. Pinellas and Hillsborough counties also help to support the group’s operation in the Tampa area.
Sanabria, a former tennis player with an athletic scholarship to the University of Central Florida holds a masters degree in business administration. He was named the group’s president and CEO in September of 2009 after an exhaustive search that attracted about 100 candidates. He spoke recently to Sentinel staff writer Víctor Manuel Ramos.
Why did you come to Orlando?
I played tennis my whole life, so when I graduated high school I started looking for colleges and universities here that would have a good athletic program. I had a friend who was at UCF and I came here and I fell in love with it. I had an athletic scholarship with them at UCF. I have been playing tennis since I was 4 years old… We won our first conference championship in my senior year at UCF, so, yeah, I had a good time.
What is the Hispanic Business Initiative Fund?
The HBIF is a 501c3 nonprofit organization that provides technical assistance and training to Hispanic entrepreneurs who want to establish a business in Florida… It started in Tampa in 1991. We brought the model in 1995 to Orlando and merged both organizations under Hispanic Business Initiative Fund of Florida Inc. Primarily, we offer three areas of service: seminars and workshops throughout the year, on a diverse number of topics from how to certify your business as a minority to how to write a business plan and how to advertise your company through the Internet. We offer about 35 to 40 workshops a year between Orlando and Tampa. In addition to the workshops we also offer an orientation on how to start a business and we offer that twice a week in the Central Florida area, once in Kissimmee and once in downtown Orlando. In addition to that, we offer one-on-one technical assistance to people starting or wanting to start a business. … All of these services are bilingual. The third option is technical assistance scholarships, for say someone who needs legal advice, where we subcontract with professional providers to provide that assistance to the client. We sometimes subcontract a consultant to help a business owner write a business plan and we help them reach out to the banks to request a loan. In essence we create a team for our clients.
Aren’t your workshops and services limited to Spanish-language speakers?
Yes. There’s a reason behind that. We are one of 12 business providers at the Disney Entrepreneur Center and there are other organizations that already offer seminars in English and, since we don’t want to be duplicating services, we provide our workshops in Spanish. If someone comes to our office who is more comfortable in English we would most likely refer them to one of those other organizations and that’s the beauty of the Disney Entrepreneur Center, that you have 12 community organizations and community partners that are sharing information and resources to develop entrepreneurship in the Orlando area.
Isn’t the inability to speak English one of the main obstacles for Hispanic entrepreneurs?
Yes, and that’s why we are here. One of the reasons HBIF is so important is that there is a segment of our Hispanic population — in the I-4 corridor, there’s over a million Hispanics; in Central Florida we have over 500,000 Hispanics — [that] is a relatively new Hispanic population, so most of the Hispanics in Central Florida are first-generation Hispanics and what that means is that while the majority of them do speak English, there are folks who may have been entrepreneurs in Venezuela, Colombia or Mexico and they want to start a business, but even though they speak some English they feel more comfortable in Spanish. One of the things we tell them is that if you want to succeed in the U.S. you have to learn English. We want to make sure they are doing things right and if the services are available in Spanish, why not?
Say I have an idea for a business: I want to start this publication called the Orlando Sentinel and I think there’s a market for it. What can you do for me?
Our business orientation is a good place to start. We teach people the basics of accounting, how much is it going to cost to publish, how big of a space you are going to need to have, what’s the startup cost of a company and how much is it going to cost you to keep it running. We typically recommend people to have six months of expenses to keep the company running. Often times the biggest mistake people make is they start the company with less cash they will actually need and as soon as they open their doors they run out of cash flow… If all of those things are in a good place, if you have the resources and you have part of the capital, and you have experience, we might consider providing you a scholarship so you can meet with an attorney and establish a legal structure, meet with a marketing consultant and develop a plan and you can go from there. We have clients that keep coming back to us for years because our services don’t expire. And that is great because a client that has been established for 15 or 20 years can come back and revise their business plan and I would work with them… You have to look at the ABCs of a business: do you have the capital? Do you have the experience? Do you know how to manage a business?
What are the most popular business proposals you see and what are the main challenges faced by the business owners who come to your workshops?
I wouldn’t be able to tell you specifically what’s the most popular area… We see trends from time to time. Some years we see a lot of day care [providers], sometimes we see a lot of food-related business, anything from a hot dog cart to a multimillion dollar restaurant… Right now we are seeing a lot of professionals, CPAs, attorneys… In the Hispanic business community we love to cook, so restaurants are a very common concept and of course the challenge they are facing right now is, first of all, access to capital. If you are a restaurant owner and you go to a bank they will probably show you the way out. It’s probably one of the riskiest businesses out there… Some of the other challenges are not only access to capital, but also credit. If I have a restaurant I am probably buying my food supplies with a credit card, because I would cook the food and sell it and I would have 30 days to pay back. A lot of banks have cut their credit lines in half and now you are stuck with going to Target to get the chicken and you have to pay more… A lot of it has to do with financial situations, credit and access to capital, and consumers in general are looking at ways in which they can cut their spending, so it makes it that much more competitive for a restaurant owner, especially a small business, to stay alive… Another big area for us is construction and we have a very successful contractor’s academy that we put together twice a year in Orlando, and once a year in Tampa, and because of that we get a lot of construction companies, but they are dealing with a lot of problems right now… They were doing very, very well two or three years ago, but unfortunately they did not do well managing their budgets and leaving cash for these difficult times… One of the biggest problems they have is cash flow… Let’s say they get a contract with Orange County and you have to build: you start working today, but you can’t get paid until 45 or 60 days [later] and you have to pay your workers weekly and you have to purchase materials you are using and you have to assimilate or absorb those 30 to 45 days that you are out of cash. And if your credit line has been cut in half you don’t have the ability to pay your subcontractors… We have many clients who have the contracts, that’s not the problem, but they can’t subsidize 45 labors or material because they don’t have the cash flow.
Is there anything you can do to help clients with financing?
We don’t have a loan program, so we are limited to what banking institutions can do for them. If you come to HBIF we could identify 15 to 20 financial institutions and perhaps one of them could help you out. We know what deals are attractive to them and we can match them to your project. We have a partnership with Accion USA, a microlender organization, and they offer loans of up to $50,000 and they are a bit more lenient than banks.
Have you been a business owner? What led to your current position?
The first thing I would say is I was raised in an entrepreneurial family. My dad had a business for 12 or 25 years, my mom and my sister have a restaurant, and they have owned it for about 10 years. I used to help them. When I was in college I did open my own business as well. I was buying products here in the state and distributing them in Central America. If you ask me what I want to be doing in ten years, it is to actually own my own business… For me this organization was a great match because I have been able to learn what it takes to start and own my own business and learn about different businesses. At HBIF you are analyzing different businesses, different types of industries and different backgrounds and I have expanded my knowledge while being able to do something good for the community. The look in a client’s place when they get approved for a loan or a scholarship, that for me is priceless. This is where my passion is and anyone who talks to me can notice that very quickly.
Tell me of a success story. What entrepreneur of business has HBIF helped recently that would showcase the importance of your group?
We have Rinse Cleaners, an environmentally-friendly dry cleaner. They came from Venezuela 15 to 20 years ago and they started in the dry cleaning business but didn’t have the money to buy one, so they would pick up your clothes from your home or your business and take it to a dry cleaner and bring it back to you. About two years into their business they came to HBIF and we started working with them. We started trying to grow their business, their delivery service and doing a bit more marketing so they could have enough clientele so we could justify getting their own dry cleaning place, rather than subcontracting. After a while we thought it was a good time to make the investment. They purchased a location and the equipment and we helped them get a loan and it was a $1 million project. It is top of the line technology here in Florida and it is the first “wet cleaner” in the Central Florida area. They were able to invest some more and have an environmentally-friendly and green company. They started operations in 2008, which was a bit unfortunate because that’s when the economy tanked, but they have been able to survive and they are located in [east Orange County].
So you’ve told me you are from Argentina and are in the process of becoming a U.S. citizen: Which team would you root for in a soccer World Cup match between the U.S. and Argentina?
That’s a tough one. I have been here for ten years and I call the U.S. home. Let’s say I would pick the Orlando Magic, how about that?
Víctor Manuel Ramos can be reached at vramos@orlandosentinel.com or 407-420-6186. Readers can also follow his work by subscribing to his Twitter feed and Facebook page. Blog subscribers can read and comment on the original post at http://www.orlandosentinel.com/hispanosphere.
