‘Get your back office together': 6 tips from the Herald's Black business event

Miami Herald

17 hours ago

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.'