Entrepreneur Commons - January 26 recap

Entrepreneur Commons held its first meeting of the year on Thursday, January 26^th, 2012 in offices of Incubate Miami. The start of the meeting schedule was moved up to 6:30 pm to allow participants more time to fight the traffic and arrive on time.  We want to thank Ms. Dunia Miranda, the Trade Representative of Guatemala, for bring refreshments for the group.  She brought imported beer, black bean dip that she had personally made and chips.  The imported beer uses the brand name Famosa in the USA, but in Guatemala this beer is the famous Gallo brand.  Unfortunately for the Guatemalan brewery this brand name belongs to another company is the USA.  Additionally, we want to thank Nicolas Novakovic for bringing Life Premium organic fruit juices, these are imported from Serbia and are available in Whole Foods as well as other fine stores.

Nineteen entrepreneurs were present and there were lively discussions during our introductions roundtable.  Most of these discussions focused on marketing issues from: Mobile Marketing to Location Based Marketing to History Marketing and even Real Life Interactive Cooking Marketing. 

After the introductions we had the fortune of having Mr. Oliver Ruiz, a patent/trademark/copyright attorney with Malloy & Malloy, address the group on trademark, patent and copyright issues.  Given the issues that Cerveza Gallo faced in the USA, Mr. Ruiz’s presentation was most appropriate for our meeting. Since I cannot offer legal advice I will not try to summarize his comments, but his participation was very valuable and he answered a series of questions.  Thank you, Oliver for your valuable comments.  If any Entrepreneur Commons participants wish to contact Mr. Ruiz his office phone  number is: 305-858-8000.

We then proceeded to address other topics that were brought up by the group. One that was actively discussed dealt with Customer Relationship Management.  One participant was concerned on how to deal with all of his customers.  He “loves” all of his customers, but the small ones are just as time consuming as his larger customers.  The group feedback was basically to prioritize his customer base, to consider target marketing and focus, and even to drop his smaller time and resource consuming customers so that he can concentrate on building his building with his larger customers.

Our next meeting will be at the end of February or the beginning of March.  A follow-up e-mail will be sent out to determine the most appropriate dates for all concerned.