L.A.'s Black Business Scavenger Hunt returns for its fifth year
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Miami Herald
9 hours ago
- Miami Herald
‘Get your back office together': 6 tips from the Herald's Black business event
What does it take for a Black-owned business to succeed in South Florida? Three Miami business leaders spoke Tuesday night at Miami Gardens' Co-Space for 'Building Black Businesses,' a Miami Herald discussion on how local entrepreneurs can launch small businesses or elevate existing ventures. Suzan McDowell, the founder of Circle of One Marketing; Aamir Taylor, the owner of Italian Vice, a frozen treats business; and Matthew Pigatt, the director of small business and membership services at the Miami-Dade Chamber of Commerce, spoke about what small business owners can do to succeed. Here are some of the key takeaways from the discussion: McDowell believes in the importance of being so good at something that people will advocate for you, even in your absence. 'Part of marketing is when somebody in this room is in another room that I'm not in and somebody brings up my name,' she said. 'It's a part of marketing. It's what people are saying about you.' Taylor agreed with that approach, especially thinking back to when he started his Italian ice business five years ago. 'I'm my marketer,' he said. 'I was in front of every single person. I'm serving every single person. So that was my goal, was to put smiles on people's faces and to be my own marketing. So when you see my Instagram, you're gonna see me. You're going to see me, probably in almost every single picture. You're gonna see my staff.' Pigatt emphasized the need for business owners to have their paperwork in order. 'Get your back office together,' Pigatt said. 'That means your financials, taxes, not reporting a loss every single year, making sure you can look at a profit and produce a profit and loss statement, your SunBiz is up to date and that you're not owing taxes.' 'These are the fundamentals, and in having all those things in a folder — all your certifications, your business plan, your [standard operating procedure] — those things help tremendously and help build a business.' Taylor said there were several organizations, including the Miami-Dade Chamber, that helped him out with that when he first started. 'I had a lot of help from Miami Bayside Foundation. They started me off in one of my first loans. The Miami Foundation, another one,' he said. 'A big company that helped me a lot was aīre ventures. They were called Opportunity Connect when I first started, but aīre ventures, they helped me a lot with financials, bookkeeping, learning my business and things of that nature.' McDowell said business owners don't necessarily need a big budget for social media. One way to get out there is to take videos of your work and share them. 'We post flyers, because sometimes you've got to get information out,' she said. 'But videos — somebody needs to be taking a video. You post it, and then that's how you're going to get engagement. It's videos of people doing things, doing regular things.' Taylor has received grants from organizations like the Miami Foundation and acknowledged that they can help small business owners excel. But he recommends that entrepreneurs use the money wisely and don't grow dependent on them. 'Once you apply for your grants and loans, don't ever expect them,' Taylor said. 'Don't ever wait on them. Because you can get a grant today, and you might not get that grant money for eight months after they tell you that you got the grant.' Taylor recommends that entrepreneurs establish good personal credit so that they can eventually use and build business credit. 'Make sure you have your credit in place [by] building your personal credit first, but that's something that you want to almost try to get away from,' he said. 'You need to start thinking about business credit. ... Getting your personal credit up to where it needs to be, you can walk into a bank, no problems.' The Miami-Dade Chamber offers AI training, and Pigatt said that using AI can help small business owners in a big way. 'You can look up business use cases for ChatGPT, marketing use cases for ChatGPT, and people will break down these use cases,' he said. 'When you see how other people are using it, then you can see how you use it for yourself.' McDowell said her staff recently encouraged her to use ChatGPT to help write a business proposal. 'It gave me a wonderful proposal, and now we got the account,' she said. 'So it's really there to make your life easier. But I don't think AI is ever going to be able to duplicate me or you or any of us.' Taylor said he uses AI to help craft email responses when the situation calls for it. 'Responding to emails we're all dealing with, disgruntled customers, just using AI to respond to emails in a nice, smooth manner. You know, there's people that ask me to do events and stuff like that, and I don't like to turn anything down, but I need to be able to make a certain amount of money,' he said. 'To be able to let people down in a nice way and respond to people in a nice way, I think that's what it helps me with, personally.'
Yahoo
12 hours ago
- Yahoo
Court Lets Trump Block Billions of Dollars in Foreign Aid
(Bloomberg) -- The Trump administration can cut billions of dollars in foreign assistance funds approved by Congress for this year, a US appeals court ruled. Sunseeking Germans Face Swiss Backlash Over Alpine Holiday Congestion To Head Off Severe Storm Surges, Nova Scotia Invests in 'Living Shorelines' New York Warns of $34 Billion Budget Hole, Biggest Since 2009 Crisis Five Years After Black Lives Matter, Brussels' Colonial Statues Remain For Homeless Cyclists, Bikes Bring an Escape From the Streets In a 2-1 decision on Wednesday, the appellate panel reversed a Washington federal judge who found that US officials were violating the Constitution's separation of powers principles by failing to authorize the money to be paid in line with what the legislative branch directed. The ruling is a significant win for President Donald Trump's efforts to dissolve the US Agency for International Development and broadly withhold funding from programs that have fallen out of favor with his administration, regardless of how Congress exercised its authority over spending. Trump's critics have assailed what they've described as a far-reaching power grab by the executive branch. The nonprofits and business that sued could ask all of the active judges on the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit to reconsider the three-member panel's decision. If the panel's decision stands, it wasn't immediately clear how much it would affect other lawsuits contesting a range of Trump administration funding freezes and cuts besides foreign aid. Judge Karen LeCraft Henderson wrote in the majority opinion that the challengers lacked valid legal grounds to sue over the Trump administration's decision to withhold the funds, also known as impoundment. The US Comptroller General — who leads an accountability arm of Congress — could sue under a specific law related to impoundment decisions, Henderson wrote, but the challengers couldn't bring a 'freestanding' constitutional claim or claim violations of a different law related to agency actions. Henderson, appointed by former President George H.W. Bush, was joined by Judge Greg Katsas, a Trump appointee. The court didn't reach the core question of whether the administration's unilateral decision to refuse to spend money appropriated by Congress is constitutional. Judge Florence Pan, nominated by former President Joe Biden, dissented, writing that her colleagues had turned 'a blind eye to the 'serious implications' of this case for the rule of law and the very structure of our government.' White House spokesperson Anna Kelly said in a statement that the appeals court 'has affirmed what we already knew – President Trump has the executive authority to execute his own foreign policy, which includes ensuring that all foreign assistance aligns with the America First agenda.' A lead attorney for the grant recipients did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The two consolidated cases before the appeals court only deal with money that Congress approved for the 2024 fiscal year, which ends on Sept. 30. Grantees are poised to lose access to funds if they haven't yet been approved to be spent by federal officials — a precursor to actual payouts — or unless a court order is in place. The administration lost one of its few battles before the US Supreme Court earlier this year in the foreign aid fight. In March, a majority of justices refused to immediately stop US District Judge Amir Ali's injunction taking effect while the legal fight went forward. Since then, however, the challengers have filed complaints with Ali that the administration is failing to obligate or pay out the funds. They've rebuffed the government's position that the delay is part of a legitimate effort to 'evaluate the appropriate next steps' and accused officials of angling to use a novel tactic to go around Congress in order to cut appropriated money. The Trump administration has dramatically scaled back the US government's humanitarian work overseas, slashing spending and personnel and merging the USAID into the State Department. The challengers say the foreign aid freeze has created a global crisis, and that the money is critical for malaria prevention, to address child malnutrition and provide postnatal care for newborns. The groups argued that the president and agency leaders couldn't defy Congress' spending mandates and didn't have discretion to decide that only some, let alone none, of the money appropriated by lawmakers should be paid. The president can ask Congress to withdraw appropriations but can't do it on his own, the challengers argued. The Justice Department argued Ali's order was an 'improper judicial intrusion into matters left to the political branches' and that the judge wrongly interfered in the 'particularly sensitive area of foreign relations.' The government also said that the Impoundment Control Act, which restricts the president from overruling Congress' spending decisions, wasn't a law that the nonprofits and business could sue to enforce. The challengers countered that Ali's order blocking the funding freeze was rooted in their constitutional separation-of-powers claim, not the impoundment law. The cases are Global Health Council v. Trump, 25-5097, and AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition v. US Department of State, 25-5098, US Court of Appeals, DC Circuit. (Updated with White House comment.) Bessent on Tariffs, Deficits and Embracing Trump's Economic Plan Why It's Actually a Good Time to Buy a House, According to a Zillow Economist Dubai's Housing Boom Is Stoking Fears of Another Crash The Social Media Trend Machine Is Spitting Out Weirder and Weirder Results Americans Are Getting Priced Out of Homeownership at Record Rates ©2025 Bloomberg L.P. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Yahoo
13 hours ago
- Yahoo
Court Lets Trump Block Billions of Dollars in Foreign Aid
(Bloomberg) -- The Trump administration can cut billions of dollars in foreign assistance funds approved by Congress for this year, a US appeals court ruled. Sunseeking Germans Face Swiss Backlash Over Alpine Holiday Congestion To Head Off Severe Storm Surges, Nova Scotia Invests in 'Living Shorelines' New York Warns of $34 Billion Budget Hole, Biggest Since 2009 Crisis Five Years After Black Lives Matter, Brussels' Colonial Statues Remain For Homeless Cyclists, Bikes Bring an Escape From the Streets In a 2-1 decision on Wednesday, the appellate panel reversed a Washington federal judge who found that US officials were violating the Constitution's separation of powers principles by failing to authorize the money to be paid in line with what the legislative branch directed. The ruling is a significant win for President Donald Trump's efforts to dissolve the US Agency for International Development and broadly withhold funding from programs that have fallen out of favor with his administration, regardless of how Congress exercised its authority over spending. Trump's critics have assailed what they've described as a far-reaching power grab by the executive branch. The nonprofits and business that sued could ask the all of the active judges on the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit to reconsider the three-member panel's decision. Judge Karen LeCraft Henderson wrote in the majority opinion that the challengers lacked valid legal grounds to sue over the Trump administration's decision to withhold the funds, also known as impoundment. The US Comptroller General — who leads an accountability arm of Congress — could sue under a specific law related to impoundment decisions, Henderson wrote, but the challengers couldn't bring a 'freestanding' constitutional claim or claim violations of a different law related to agency actions. Henderson, appointed by former President George H.W. Bush, was joined by Judge Greg Katsas, a Trump appointee. The court didn't reach the core question of whether the administration's unilateral decision to refuse to spend money appropriated by Congress is constitutional. Judge Florence Pan, nominated by former President Joe Biden, dissented, writing that her colleagues had turned 'a blind eye to the 'serious implications' of this case for the rule of law and the very structure of our government.' The two consolidated cases before the appeals court only deal with money that Congress approved for the 2024 fiscal year, which ends on Sept. 30. Grantees are poised to lose access to funds if they haven't yet been approved to be spent by federal officials — a precursor to actual payouts — or unless a court order is in place. The administration lost one of its few battles before the US Supreme Court earlier this year in the foreign aid fight. In March, a majority of justices refused to immediately stop US District Judge Amir Ali's injunction taking effect while the legal fight went forward. Since then, however, the challengers have filed complaints with Ali that the administration is failing to obligate or pay out the funds. They've rebuffed the government's position that the delay is part of a legitimate effort to 'evaluate the appropriate next steps' and accused officials of angling to use a novel tactic to go around Congress in order to cut appropriated money. The Trump administration has dramatically scaled back the US government's humanitarian work overseas, slashing spending and personnel and merging the US Agency for International Development into the State Department. The challengers say the foreign aid freeze has created a global crisis, and that the money is critical for malaria prevention, to address child malnutrition and provide postnatal care for newborns. The groups argued that the president and agency leaders couldn't defy Congress' spending mandates and didn't have discretion to decide that only some, let alone none, of the money appropriated by lawmakers should be paid. The president can ask Congress to withdraw appropriations but can't do it on his own, the challengers argued. The Justice Department argued Ali's order was an 'improper judicial intrusion into matters left to the political branches' and that the judge wrongly interfered in the 'particularly sensitive area of foreign relations.' The government also said that the Impoundment Control Act, which restricts the president from overruling Congress' spending decisions, wasn't a law that the nonprofits and business could sue to enforce. The challengers countered that Ali's order blocking the funding freeze was rooted in their constitutional separation-of-powers claim, not the impoundment law. The cases are Global Health Council v. Trump, 25-5097, and AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition v. US Department of State, 25-5098, US Court of Appeals, DC Circuit. (Updated with details from the opinion.) Bessent on Tariffs, Deficits and Embracing Trump's Economic Plan Why It's Actually a Good Time to Buy a House, According to a Zillow Economist Dubai's Housing Boom Is Stoking Fears of Another Crash The Social Media Trend Machine Is Spitting Out Weirder and Weirder Results A $340 Million New York Office Makeover Is Converting Boardrooms to Bedrooms ©2025 Bloomberg L.P. 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