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BUSINESS LOUN G E

Omar Azan:

Manufacturing a Legacy

he term “Palm Beach Special” strikes a particular chord within Omar Azan. No, it is neither the name of his first cocktail nor a particularly good time in Florida but rather it was the name given to the first suite of furniture that his Boss Furniture company sold to a big Jamaican retailer. Mr. Azan used some savvy and a belief in his product, to convince the purchasing manager of the store to take the suite on an Omar Azan interesting consignment deal. The suite was sold within an hour of being put in the store and the three year old fledgling company, of a mere 9 employees at the time, never looked back.

“The JMA is my other family, said the Boss principal, “I worked my way through the ranks and I do believe that manufacturing hold the key to fixing the economy.” Mr. Azan was insistent on the fact that Jamaicans need to break the mindset of “buying foreign”. “When we support our local manufacturers, we provide jobs for our countrymen, we provide taxes for Government and we save foreign exchange, Mr. Azan said, “everybody else in the world is looking out for themselves, why not us?”

The founder of Boss Furniture company and the president of the Jamaica Manufacturers’ Association sat with Your Money in our Business Lounge to share his story, his experiences, his views on business, the economy and the biggest thing in his life, family. Mr. Azan, who graduated as the head boy of the Hillel Academy, realized after a brief interest in pursuing medicine that entrepreneurship may very well be hereditary. “I was a paramedic in the United States for a number of years during and after college but I soon realized that the number of years of study for medicine combined with the lure of business made me realize that this is the direction I wanted to go” stated the JMA president. The Azan family had migrated to Lebanon and then Antigua during the social turmoil of 1970s Jamaica and it was in Antigua that the older Mr. Azan started a garment factory. Omar followed suit and started Boss Furniture in 1990 with a complement of 9 workers and a total capital of $10,000. Today, Boss has a complement of three factories with 220 workers and is a major supplier to Jamaican and Caribbean interests. “It’s been a long journey but we’ve come a long way” said a smiling Mr. Azan.

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An Entrepreneur’ s Life

How to find a Business Idea By Cherryl Hanson Simpson

In these times when nine-to-five jobs are becoming less secure, many persons are thinking of starting their own businesses. However, it can sometimes be difficult to figure out what type of enterprise to get involved in. What’s the best way for budding entrepreneurs to find profitable business opportunities?

small segment of buyers, and perfect a product or service to meet their specific needs. So a furniture manufacturer could become a ‘category killer’ by specialising in functional pieces for pre-schools.

A few years ago, I participated in the Guerilla Business School, a training seminar organized by Peak Potentials. In this course, founder T. Harv Eker provided some strategies to identify great business ideas. Here are a few:

Changing technology presents many opportunities for new entrepreneurs to repackage commonplace concepts into new business ideas. One example suggested by Eker was using the internet to offer webinars, which are online seminars. A training company could have a whole new line of business and increased customers from making use of the web.

Look out for problems

Eker explained that pleasure and pain are strong motivating forces for people; but the avoidance of pain is actually a stronger impetus that the search for pleasure. Therefore we could actively look around to find people’s problems wherever they existed, and create products or services that would solve their pain for profit.

Make use of changing trends

Improve an existing concept

So get creative about your own business ideas. Entrepreneur Richard Branson definitely got it right when he said, “Business opportunities are like buses, there’s always another one coming.”

Copy a proven winner

© 2009 Cherryl Hanson Simpson ……………………………………………………… Cherryl is a financial consultant and coach, and founder of Financially S.M.A.R.T. Services. See more of her work at www.financiallysmartonline.com. Email Cherryl at advice@financiallysmartonline.com. Please add this address to your email address book in order to ensure you receive a response.

Nothing is perfect, Eker declared, and so you could create your own enterprise by improving on someone else’s business idea. “It’s often better to be second than first,” Eker asserted. You could examine a pioneering product or service to locate any problems in the original concept, and then develop an improved offering.

When thinking of your own business, you don’t have to recreate the wheel. If someone else is making money with a concept, so can you. Eker revealed that you could take advantage of the lag time involved in moving a brand new idea from one geographical location to another. Look out for hot trends in business magazines such as Entrepreneur and online sources like www.trendletter.com.

Piggyback on another business

You can have a profitable enterprise by just marketing another company’s products or services. Some options include becoming an agent or distributor, being an affiliate marketer, getting a license or franchise, or entering into a joint venture agreement. Eker also recommended looking out for under-marketed products that had potential to grow once they were promoted properly.

Focus on niche ideas

Another possibility is to change the niche market of an existing product. Eker explained that you could create an entire business concept by focusing on a

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YOUR MONEY INSIG HT S

The Crossroads:

Energy Efficiency and Profitability

There are certain terms which seem a bit worn out these days. “Global economic crisis” and “Going green” certainly rings more than a few bells. These two terms invoke quite different feelings upon being heard, one term refers to an occurrence that we’d sooner forget while the other is somewhat of a mantra which urges us to leave something for our future generations. However there is an intersecting of these two terms that may yield invaluable information pertaining to the efficiency and profitability of our businesses and homes. This crossing asks the question; “Can being more energy efficient make us more financially efficient?”

play where a company thinks how their actions will profit not only themselves but the world in 50 years. Government may have to implement unpopular restrictions and global cooperation will be key. But if green really is the new gold then we have to make sure that green is really our goal.

The realization that the resources provided by Mother Earth are indeed finite and are being depleted faster than they could ever be replaced has prompted the somewhat fashionable “green revolution”. Companies, motivated either by civic responsibility or the sheer marketability of being eco-friendly in a time of such awareness, have taken steps to improve their energy efficiency and their consumption. Individuals have taken it upon themselves to research and implement ways of reducing their carbon usage by investing in alternative energy sources for home and driving hybrid cars. Green is good but can green be gold? Being more efficient at one aspect of a company or individual’s life will undoubtedly have positive effects on another. For example a company investing in solar powered air-conditioning, promoting electronic communication and other methods of going green will ultimately find that this efficiency could lead to the overheads being reduced dramatically. The same could be pointed out at the individual level with persons drastically reducing power bills while reducing the size of their carbon footprint. That is all well and good at this level, but is being green and employing these tactics really just a drop in the bucket at the global level? In an ironic post, CBS news commented that the carbon footprint left by massive motorcades transporting diplomats at the UN Summit for Climate change may just show how farcical our present efforts really are. The fact remains that a global economy is said to be doing well if it is growing and with growth comes consumption. With this realization, it stirs the mind that being responsible towards future generations may just involve more than improving the profits of a company or an individual. A reimagining of the term “profit” may have to come into

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