Profits and Prophets

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By Randy Bechtel

Matchmaker, Matchmaker, Find Me a Biz
Stocks have you down? Bonds? Real estate? Commodities? One investment option investors often overlook is the purchase of a business. “Buying a business is no riskier than any other kind of investment,” claims Michelle Horan, an agent for Paramount Business Brokers in Sacramento (paramountbusinessbrokers.com). And for people weary of markets that dance to the tunes of Wall Street insiders, the Federal Reserve, war and peace, big oil and foreign investors, a business offers a rate of return that is, more than any other investment, within the investor’s control.
    What rate of return? “That really varies,” says Horan, whose company brokers businesses with price tags ranging from $50,000 to several millions. “Obviously the returns are different for someone who buys a business with 20 employees and $1 million in sales compared with someone who buys a coffee cart because he wants to be his own boss, set his hours and avoid rent by parking his business in the driveway.”
    These contrasting scenarios can apply to people who have owned a business before and people who have never worked for anyone else’s business.
    “Probably 80 percent of our buyers are first-time business owners,” Horan says. “Many are retired. Others want to invest savings or an inheritance.” She adds that while qualifying for lender financing is the norm, an occasional deal has involved 100 percent financing by the seller. But then, the business-brokerage business defies most generalizations, she says. For instance, the time commitment buyers want to make to a business ranges from full time for people buying themselves a job to next to nil for people wanting to be absentee owners while entrusting operations to a manager.
    The only constant about buyers is they expect their investments to yield income and appreciate in value, Horan says. To ensure that end, good brokers appraise a business by taking into account income, assets and market. Buyers, on the other hand, must prove their worth by completing confidential financial statements.
    Number crunching aside, Horan says her job is akin to “matching people on the internet; that is, matching the personality of the buyer with the personality of the business.” Sometimes a pairing is a natural, such as the duffer who bought a golf-cart dealership. On the other hand, people often discover interests they never knew they had until presented with the opportunity to pursue them as a business, Horan says.
    “And there are a lot of adventuresome people out there,” she notes. “They say, ‘Hey, that’s a good bottom line. I can learn this business.’ ”

Translating Español Into Dinero
First, businesses realized that HTML and Java programming alone did not a webmaster make. Equally important was talent and skill to deliver professional graphic design. After that came the epiphany that a website’s marketing punch goes from lightweight to Holyfield when text is grammatical and says something that resonates with consumers. Today, businesses are discovering professionally written text translates into even more dollars when it’s presented in Spanish as well as English.
    The avant-garde of Español marketing were real-estate brokers, law firms, insurance companies and healthcare providers — in sum, service companies, says Faviola Valencia, owner of HS Interpreters in Sacramento. Following their path is a spate of small businesses. “We even have a couple of auto-body shops,” laughs Valencia, whose larger clients include Prudential Insurance, the Sacramento Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce and Sutter Health.
    HS Interpreters (hsinterpreters.com) offers interpreters and translators, the difference being, Valencia points out, interpreters are concerned with the spoken word and translators with the written. “We have local translators, but most of the translators are from Mexico,” she says. “They have degrees in the medical, legal or some other field. All of our translators go through state certification.”
    There are generally two approaches to presenting translated text on the web: an alternative Spanish website that mirrors the English version or presenting Spanish text side-by-side with English. In either case, clients “usually email us the web page they want translated. It’s that easy,” she notes.
    And worth it, too, when you consider 26 percent of Sacramento County’s population will be Hispanic by 2010, according to projections of the California Department of Finance. More important for advertisers, 67 percent of the Hispanic population will be younger than 40. Although it’s anyone’s guess how many will speak Spanish, the additional marketing advantage of Spanish is that it projects to consumers, whether they can read the language or not, that a company is Hispanic-friendly. “Which is good,” says Valencia, whose firm is one of three translators touted by the Sacramento Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. “People are making a lot of money.”
    What are the costs for translations? “We give quotes per word or per page,” she says. “We look at the document to see how lengthy and technical it is. The kind of terminology used. An 8-inch x 10-inch page that is general business and not too technical can run a minimum $35 to $40.”

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