BRG successfully mixes business and fun
October 4, 2007

At the installation banquet at Red Fish Grill, Kemy Michael Aznabay, AmTrust Bank, left, was sworn as the incoming president of BRG. Also pictured are immediate past president Eli Ristine of Pan Florida Realty and attorney Carlos Castillo, president-elect.

It’s that time of year when the business networking organizations install new board and officers and have parties to celebrate the occasion.
In the smaller organizations, these are family affairs where people who network together all year party with spouses and significant others. It is usually not a comfortable place for an outsider. But when the Business Referral Group invited me to join its annual installation banquet, I accepted immediately because I feel part of the family.
BRG is a leads group that meets for lunch every Tuesday at City Cellar in Coral Gables. Members are expected not only to do business with each other, but to learn about each other’s business so they can make referrals.
I interact with many networking groups, and BRG is one that has lots of fun. The members really like each other. You can tell. The slogan is, “Where Friendships Create Business.”
My wife and I got to know BRG two years ago when the installation banquet was on a one-night cruise to nowhere. The food and service were terrible, the room was awful, yet we had a great time. It was a real bonding experience and when the 24 hours were over, we had some new friends.
Now BRG has scheduled a three-night cruise in December, put together by travel agent Louise Gross, and we are going again. Louise missed the installation banquet, being in Indonesia visiting her daughter and grandchildren. She came home long enough to do laundry and pick up Carol Alexander, and they are off to some new exotic location. (I hope I don’t have any tax problems over the next couple of weeks. Carol is my accountant.)
Anyway, the BRG installation banquet was at Red Fish Grill, where the food is great but the bathrooms are in an outhouse and apparently Coral Gables won’t let them build a covered walkway. Thank goodness the rain had stopped!
Eli Ristine of Pan Florida Realty stepped down after a great year as president, and Kemy Michael Aznabay of AmTrust Bank is the new president.
Dominic Lamberti of Padgett Business Services swore in the new officers and board, having them pledge to “serve cheerfully, willingly and to the highest standard of sobriety” and “to sacrifice all my free time, ignore my spouse and children, and give all my money to the BRG.”
Commercial attorney Carlos Castillo is the new president-elect, and other officers include Lamberti, Gross, Roxana Rauseo of ADP Small Business Services, Sara Granzotti of Health…Pure and Simple, public relations specialist Connie Crowther, Julie Rico of Rainbow Reproductions and accountant Ricki Mercado.
If you want to know more about BRG, go to the Organizations page and click on the logo. Don’t be put off if you business category appears to be taken, because sometimes you will be surprised. There are enough attorneys in BRG to start their own little bar association, for example, each representing a different specialty of law.
If you want to know if you are eligible for membership, call Sara Granzotti, the membership chair, 786-521-2800. First lunch meetings are free to eligible business people who want to check out the group. See the Events page for details of upcoming meetings.

Meet Tom Bovee, networking champion

September 6, 2007

Tom Bovee of Corporate Express, left, spoke at the Progress Club of Miami, one of the area’s oldest networking groups, dating back to 1965. With him are Carlos Garcia of Please Hold Advertising, Robert Pearce of US Financial Advisors and Daniel Rojas of Kahn-Carlin.

If you network in Miami-Dade for any length of time, you soon will run into Tom Bovee.
If there was a Networking Hall of Fame in our area, Tom would be in it. He’s a firm believer in the concept of networking and promotes it all the time, convincing people to join and get active in the business organizations. If he only had a dollar for everyone he introduced to networking, he could have retired long ago.
So when I saw that Tom Bovee was speaking at the Progress Club of Miami, I dragged myself out of bed and made my way to the Country Club of Coral Gables for the organization’s weekly 7 a.m. breakfast meeting.
Tom, with Corporate Express, took advantage of his microphone time to promote his company, noting that Corporate Express is in 20 countries and the leader in office supplies. He said giving up his own small business and entering the corporate world several years ago was difficult, but eventually he realized that both required the same skill set for success – know your customers, and give them personal attention.
Tom began networking back in 1960 with the key club in high school and has been involved with as many as nine business groups at a time.
“I’m only involved in five organizations right now,” he says, and he has held so many leadership roles that he has lost track. “Mostly the head of membership, VP, President, and always on one committee or the other. I’ve chaired a lot of committees.”
The Progress Club is one of his favorite groups. One of Miami’s oldest, it dates back to 1965. It is a leads group, which means one member per industry, and members are expected to do business with each other and to refer business to each other.
Tom began the talk by asking: “How much new business do you want to do in 2008?” and went around the room, calling on each club member for an answer. Then he said:
“If our 25 members each know 250 people, that’s 6,250 possible customers for members of the organization.” He did the math on a Corporate Express calculator. “If just 10% of those buy, and spend an average of $1,500 a year, that would generate $937,500 in new business for club members each year.”
He said that advertising is almost always a waste of money for small business because it means communicating with a large market of mostly people who are not potential customers. Networking, however, is very cost-effective, targeting one potential customer at a time.
If you want to talk networking, buy lunch for Tom Bovee and you will get a whole education. You can reach him at Tom.Bovee@cexp.com. Of course, he would appreciate an order for business supplies at the same time.
To learn more about the Progress Club, go to the Organizations page and click on the logo. Interesting, while the Progress Club was meeting, a BNI chapter was also meeting for breakfast elsewhere in the same building. There’s networking everywhere!
Skills Workshop a Sellout
The first Business Skills Workshop at Chamber South sold out, and that is pretty exciting. It seems to confirm what I’ve been saying for years – that the business community needs and wants programming that helps them be more successful. If the weekly sessions continue to fill the 35 seats around the table, we will have to consider alternatives.
I am leading the lunch group every Friday with executive and life coach Pat Morgan of Smooth Sailing.
The subject for Friday, Sept. 14, will be “What Your Business Card Says about You.” We will skip Sept 21, and come back on Sept. 28 with “Cost-Effective Marketing.”
One really cool innovation is that Pat created a blog to go with the workshops. It’s a place where we can post our notes, so people don’t have to take extensive notes during the session, and also where participants can post comments and suggestions, and communicate with each other. To check out the Business Skills Blog, click on the box at the top of this page.
To register for a future program, call Nicole at Chamber South at 305-661-1621 or online at www.chambersouth.com.
Cost is $15 for Chamber members and $20 for others, and if you want to assure a seat at future sessions, you can pay in advance for 5 programs and get 6.

Gimenez wonders if tax cuts should be larger

August 3, 2007

County Commissioner Carlos A. Gimenez, center, spoke at the recent Chamber South breakfast. With him, from left, Bob Gallaher, Gallaher & Birch, chamber chair-elect; Phillis Oeters, Baptist Health South Florida; Peter Jude, Kendall Regional Medical Center; and Mary Scott Russell, president of the chamber.

Miami-Dade County Commissioner Carlos A. Gimenez surprised a lot of us at the recent Chamber South breakfast by saying that the state-imposed tax cuts are not only reasonable, but probably don’t go far enough.
Some of us expected him to say that the tax cuts would create chaos and cause problems with many county services, and we were prepared to challenge that. But he took the fun out of it by telling us what we already knew – that the county was not cautious with our tax dollars during those years when property values were skyrocketing, and the current slump in the housing market is caused, at least in part, by irresponsible financial management by the county and (although he didn’t point the finger) by the school board and municipal governments.
“People are leaving Miami who I thought would be here forever,” he told the Chamber South audience at the Dadeland Marriott. “The younger generation cannot afford to buy a house. Taxes and insurance are so high, they can’t afford a mortgage payment on top of that.”
During all those years of rising property values, the County Commission held the line on the tax rate, but that tax rate was being applied to an ever-enlarging tax base as property values increased. Instead of looking at the dollars being collected and saying: “Let’s live on 3% more than last year, and adjust the tax rate down accordingly,” the county collected hundreds of millions in extra income as the tax base rose in double-digit numbers.
If you are protected by the Save Our Homes amendment, your taxes increased by no more than 3% a year. But when you try to sell your house, the next buyer will pay tax on the true value of the property, and may end up paying two or three times the taxes that you’ve been paying. If you do not have the Save Our Homes protection, if you have commercial or rental property, “your taxes have gone through the roof,” Gimenez said.
The county isn’t alone in this, of course. The school board and most municipalities are equally guilty. “Government will spend every penny it can get its hands on,” the Commissioner told the audience.
Gimenez also said that the actual amount of the budget cut faced by the county is a slippery number, depending on how it’s calculated. He said original estimates of $300 to $450 million were based on assumptions that the tax base would grow 15% and the tax rate would remain the same. In fact, he said, the actual reduction is only about $87 million out of a $2.3 billion budget.
He said that he has started to review the new proposed county budget, and so far he has not seen much in the way of cuts. “Homeowners will be disappointed when they see how little they save in taxes,” he told the Chamber. “The owner of a home valued at $250,000 in unincorporated Miami-Dade County will see a reduction of about $350 a year in county taxes. A $500,000 home will save $600 to $700.”
Gimenez said the County Commission needs to take a hard look at spending and how services can be delivered in a more efficient manner. “I have to wonder why we have more county employees now than before all the incorporations began,” he said. “We have so many new municipalities, all collecting their own taxes and taking over services that used to be provided by the county. You would think we would have significantly fewer county employees as a result.”
As nice as it was to hear Gimenez say all of this, the truth is that the crisis developed on his watch, and you have to be unhappy that he and the other commissioners did not see this coming. So let’s see what happens next. Will Gimenez take the lead to cut taxes further? What will the other commissioners do?
Gimenez also talked about the constitutional amendment that will be on the ballot in January to amend the Save Our Homes protection. If it passes, homeowners would have the choice of keeping their Save Our Homes status, or trading it for a much larger homestead exemption, which could significantly lower taxes. The typical home would have a homestead exemption of about $195,000 instead of the current $25,000, he said. So a $500,000 house would be taxed on $305,000 instead of $475,000. People who bought in recent years could find themselves with a much lower tax bill, and – in theory — it would make Save Our Homes properties easier to sell.
The Commissioner predicted that the amendment would fail. “Too complicated,” he said. “I think the Legislature will have to come back with something less complex.” But if it does pass, he said, he personally would keep the Save Our Homes protection on his house.