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Letter to the editor

Minority entrepreneurs should diversify

An officer with a company that makes loans to small businesses says newcomers must branch out from the traditional service industries.

By Christina Rexrode
Published October 28, 2007

Colden, 52, is a vice president at Aegis Business Credit in Tampa, which makes loans to small businesses. Though the company has no mandates about working with minority-owned businesses, they are close to Colden's heart.

Here are excerpts from his interview with the St. Petersburg Times:

Are you seeing any trends among the minority businesses that you work with?

In years past, most of the minority businesses that had opened or were starting were in the service industry. And that's for obvious reasons. It takes a lot of capital to open up a manufacturing plant. One of my goals was for minorities to start to move into more technological areas. And that move really has already started.

How does that move happen? Do you kind of have to change people's mentality?

Sometimes you can get pigeonholed in your community into doing things that are very ethnic-oriented, or just the status quo. Barber shops, beauty salons, funeral parlors, bars - those have traditionally been service areas where especially minority communities have been flourishing in. You can't get stuck in that type of mentality.

We need to move on and try to get involved in other types of industries, like telecommunications or computers or aeronautics. They usually take more capital, but you can get jobs that have a higher wage.

Small businesses obviously need capital to take on big projects, which is where Aegis comes in. But what else do they need?

A lot of small businesses that are coming in aren't getting as much of these big contracts that are floating around - things like (working on) Tampa General Hospital or making improvements on the airport.

Everybody has their own reason for why certain things have not happened. We've heard everything. They say there's not enough minority businesses out there, they say they can't find a minority business to do certain types of work.

So that means that the pool of available businesses has to be increased, and the type of available businesses has to be increased. And these businesses have to be better organized and better capitalized to take advantage of these opportunities.

[Last modified October 25, 2007, 14:26:28]