business in brief:
Politics, marketing, trade and trends

Suggested ways of stopping illegal immigration have generally been limited to two biggies: Build a wall and police the border to keep the immigrants out, or stop U.S. employers from hiring them so they have no reason to come in the first place.
Few believe either solution will work or even happen. Fortunately a more humane approach is being tried by a thinktank called Mexicans and Americans Thinking Together (MATT.org). Members have come to the obvious conclusion that poor people won’t risk their lives in a dash across the border if they can make a decent living back home.
MATT.org believes they can. Inspired by Muhammed Yunus of Pakistan, whose “microcredit” concept won him a 2006 Nobel Prize, the group has teamed up with microcredit lenders Kiva and Mexico-based ADVIC to provide real economic opportunities.
“MATT.org works alongside in-country based ADMIC to identify businesses in impoverished areas of Mexico that have a huge opportunity to achieve growth and success,” says MATT.org CEO Lionel Sosa. “These business owners are members of the Mexico community who are facing so many challenges, from joblessness to hunger. With the help of these microloans from average Americans through MATT.org and its partner, Kiva, access to credit will be provided so that these entrepreneurs may invest in their businesses, increase profits and help ease the effects of poverty.”
In other words, it’s a proactive way for average Americans to do something positive, even praiseworthy, about illegal immigration by directly financing identifiable, up-and-coming businesses. ADMIC technology allows lenders to keep constant tabs on how the borrowers are doing, and as the loans are repaid, they get their money back. The full story is on www.MATT.org.
—Conrad Dahlson

TECHNOLOGY: RFID is watching you
Radio Frequency Identification, or RFID, is what techies call a tool for “unobtrusive physical-asset management.” These tiny near-invisible tags can be incorporated into any physical object and then beep back to home base not only where they are, but who they’re with.
XauXa Corporation is a Hispanic-owned business that under President Michael Queralt has gotten in on the ground floor of this new technology that may do away with bar-codes on consumer goods and credit cards in your wallet.
How? Consider this scenario: A lady in a department store tries on a jacket and looks at herself in the mirror. Now, the jacket has an implanted RFID chip whose transponder sends the identity of the garment (model, color, size) to the mirror’s transceiver, which with this information presents a list on a digital display of various items that would go just faaaabulous with the jacket, such as shirt, slacks, shoes, bag, well, you get the idea. All those collateral sales and no salesperson to pay.
The point is that once entrepreneurs grasp the RFID idea, they can find many ways it can boost their bottom line. Keeping track of each individual item of goods in shipment, making sure nobody walks out of a store with a product without paying, segmenting a market by tracking and categorizing all the people who buy a certain type of product, allowing RFID-implanted big shots to dine at a top restaurant and go home with the tab totaled on their respective chips. ...
An entrepreneur has only to weigh cost savings, customer satisfaction and additional sales against the expense of the RFID service.
Xauxa Corporation recently signed on with TDS Solutions of Medford, New York, as a reseller partner to provide, as top exec Queralt said, “a unique close-loop asset-management solution that provides accountability and visibility on a real time basis.”

EXECUTIVE CALENDAR: what not to miss
February 22-23: Minority Business Opportunity Day (MBOD), sponsored by the Southern California Minority Business Development Council, Pacific Palms Conference Resort, Industry Hills, CA. For more information, call (213) 689-6960 or visit www.scmbdc.org/events/mbod.

February 27-28: League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) National Legislative Awards Gala & Policy Summit, J.W. Marriott Hotel, Washington, D.C. For more information, call (202) 833-6130 or visit www.lulac.org/events/gala2007.

March 3-4: The National Franchise and Business Opportunities Show, Expo Building 451 East 58th Avenue, Denver, CO. For more information, call (800) 891-4859 ext. 400 or e-mail info@nationalevent.com.
March 5-7: 17th Annual Legislative Conference of the United States Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, The Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center, Washington, D.C. For more information, visit ushcc.com/news-legislative.html.

March 28: 3rd Annual Supplier Diversity Breakfast & Supply Chain Summit, Kellogg Arena, Battle Creek, MI, presented by the Michigan Minority Business Development Council. For more information call (877) 840-3309 or e-mail vrcooper@mmbdc.com or visit www.mmbdc.com.

March 30-31: Women’s Conference of the League of United Latin American Citizens, Hyatt Regency Hotel, Miami, FL. For more information, call (866) 577-0726 or visit
www.lulac.org/events/women2007.

QUIPS & QUOTES: What they are saying
On marketing to Hispanics: “It’s not so much what unites Latinos that’s important as what makes us different from non-Latinos.”
—Carl Kravetz, chairman,
Association of Hispanic Advertising Agencies.

“Fortunately the issues that affect small business don’t have party labels, so we’re very hopeful that the new Congress will care about the things that our small business owners do—available and affordable healthcare, less lawsuits and fewer burdensome regulations.”
—Dan Danner, senior VP for public policy,
National Federation of Independent Business
as quoted in BusinessWeek.
“As the old saying goes, 20 percent of a sales force tends to land roughly 80 percent of the business.”
—Wiley Cotton, management consultant,
as quoted in Forbes.

“We have indeed lost 90 percent of our (travel agency) business due to the restrictions on travel imposed by Bush in 2003 and 2004, making it near impossible for Cuban Americans to visit family. ... Researchers and journalists may still go, though their numbers have been reduced by sheer intimidation from the Administration.”
—Merri Ansara, owner,
Common Ground Travel, Cambridge, MA
as quoted in BusinessWeek.

TRENDWATCH: Spending up
ilies in several industries—food, apparel, health and beauty, baby products, digital cameras, long-distance phone and pre-paid wireless—and those companies that are investing in marketing to this community are realizing gains in market share, net profits and shareholder value.
—The Dollars and “Sense” of the
Immigration Debate,
published by the Association of
Hispanic Advertising Agencies (AHAA).

TRENDWATCH: The Key to Influencing Consumers
In a survey by GfK Roper Consulting, 83 percent of adults cited past experience with a brand as the most important factor in their purchase decisions. Quality and price—issues often promoted in advertising—ranked second and third. Personal recommendations came in fourth, highlighting the importance of word of mouth.
—Bradley Johnson,
in American Demographics.

TRAVEL: Taking off
Mundo Tours travel agency in Dallas is one of those stories about an employee—in this case Colombian-born Yolanda Orrego—who one day said to herself: “If I can make money for other people selling airline tickets and booking hotels, why can’t I do it for myself?
But she was young and had no experience in business other than waiting on customers. Fortunately the Greater Dallas Hispanic Chamber of Commerce (GDHCC) was on hand with just what her dreams needed to come true—an assistance program for small businesses that consists of “incubation, consulting, teaching and seminars.”
For Orrego, the “incubation” part was a life-saver—that’s the GDHCC way of saying we’ll set you up with an office in our building complete with Internet, telephone, filing cabinets, fax and photocopier, and over there, Ms. Orrego, is the desk and the chair where you’ll sit. Oh yes, you can also use the conference room to meet clients. All that for only $200 per month.
The GDHCC program also provided Orrego free membership in the chamber that not only gave her access to highly instructive seminars but, perhaps more importantly, also launched her into the world of networking, according to GDHCC coordinator Beatriz Umanzor, as reported in the Dallas Hispano News.
And so Mundo Tours was born. Today, “Mundo Tours is a travel agency specializing in tours worldwide,” Yolanda Orrego told the Dallas Hispano News. “I currently have tours programmed to Europe, South America, the Caribbean and elsewhere. ... My prices are competitive against those of any big agency.”

the web: Virtual Common Market
A lot of Latin America got together on a new website recently to create a huge marketplace of goods and services available from micro, small and medium enterprises throughout the region.
Pymeslatinas.org was founded by the Latin American Integration Association, or ALADI, whose members include Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela.
While this could be on its way to becoming a huge internal virtual common market for those countries, all its offers are available to businesses in the United States, Spain and the Caribbean as well. Information on the website is available in English, Spanish and Portuguese.
ALADI provides the service free, so a U.S. businessman can register on the site and study what’s for sale or post exactly what he needs—and let the dealing begin.
At its launch at the end of 2006, the ALADI site had more than 700 registered products and services with an infinite possibility of growth. There’s a good chance that the U.S. entrepreneur who finds the supplies he needs on pymeslatinas.org will find the prices more than competitive.
—Conrad Dahlson

TRENDWATCH: Investing in spenders
The biggest categories for advertisement aimed at Hispanics continue to be automotive and retail. Spending by the seven auto marketers among the top 50 grew 9.5 percent (in 2006) with Ford, Toyota, Hyundai and Honda showing growth in the double digits. Media spending by the top 50 percent retail category grew 4.3 percent, a tally weighed down by a 22.7 percent decline in outlays at Sears Holding Corp. Without Sears in the mix, retail advanced 26.6 percent.
—Laurel Wentz,
Hispanic Fact Pack, Advertising Age.