Whole new beginnings

Peter Guzman had worked a variety of casino jobs in Las Vegas and was making $75,000 to $80,000 a year as a parking valet when he decided to take his career to a new level.

"I became obsessed with real estate when I was a kid playing Monopoly," said Guzman, who came to Las Vegas from Miami when he was 2 years old. "It's a real-life game. Back then, I wanted to buy everything I landed on. Now I realize you've got to buy key pieces."

The 38-year-old senior sales executive and partner with Coldwell Banker Wardley real estate said he once left a big commission on a commercial real estate transaction on the table to become part owner of an industrial park on Boulder Highway.

"I had $4,200 in the bank and I really needed that commission," he said. "I have a high risk tolerance, but there are researched risks and managed risks."

Guzman fits the profile of the changing face of the small-business entrepreneur in America.

A study from Intuit concludes that the newest generation of entrepreneurs will be far more diverse than their predecessors in age, origin and gender.

By 2017, white, middle-aged men who traditionally launch small businesses will be outnumbered by Generation Y'ers (those born after 1982), immigrants, women and retiring baby boomers who opt for a second career, the Intuit Future of Small Business Report said.

U.S. immigration policy and the outcome of current immigration debates will affect how this segment performs over the next decade.

Las Vegas, which has seen its Hispanic population grow from 10 percent to 25 percent of total population in the past 10 years, fits in with Intuit's findings, said Brian Dennehy, vice president of marketing for the Mountain View, Calif.-based business software firm.

"Immigrants follow their skill paths," he said. "There are certain U.S. metropolitan areas with large immigration, and they firmly believe in the American dream."

José Gutierrez is one of those. A native of Guadalajara, Mexico, he founded Tortillas Inc. in 1979 and has turned the North Las Vegas business over to his son, Gus.

Operating a business aimed at Hispanics has definitely had its challenges, Gus Gutierrez said.

"You can only imagine in 1979 when we didn't have this growth and economy, how hard it was," he said. "So it was holding power, for 10 or 12 years, before we really reaped the benefits of the business."

Gutierrez said his family lost everything, about $19,000, in a fire six years into business. They rebuilt with a Small Business Administration loan for $350,000 in 1986 and then expanded to a 23,000-square-foot facility with a $4 million SBA loan. The company, which sells its products under the brand names Los Arcos and La Mazorca, employs about 70 people, mostly Hispanic.

Businesses formed by immigrants range from labor and services to global trade, Dennehy said.

"A lot of these folks are getting a disproportionate number of advanced degrees at U.S. colleges. They're almost immediately able to go global with technology that wouldn't have been possible 20 years ago. They have the language skills to make that phone call, which is now a cheap phone call," he said.

Entrepreneurs will no longer come predominantly from the middle of the age spectrum, but instead from the edges, the Intuit study found. People nearing retirement and their children just entering the job market will set the bar as the most entrepreneurial group ever.

Also, American entrepreneurship will see a huge upswing in the number of women. The "glass ceiling" that has limited women's growth in traditional corporate career paths will send a rich talent pool to the small-business sector, the report said.

It's a group that Dennehy called "mompreneurs" -- mid-career women and mothers who are looking to control their own destiny.

"I find them intriguing because their rules for business are defined by themselves," Dennehy said. "Nine-to-5 doesn't work for them, but they're willing to work at night to do inventory."

While Intuit found that entrepreneurship will be a widely adopted curriculum at educational, trade and vocational institutions, David Chavez of Chavez & Koch CPAs in Las Vegas said 80 percent to 90 percent of small-business owners don't know how to read a financial statement.

He said people are reluctant to pay him $4,000 to meet with them in the first three or four months of starting a business, even though they could easily save that in taxes at the end of the year.

"Some of the costs for business should be capitalized and put on a balance sheet. Most people expense everything, so you're not making as much as you should be," Chavez said at the Latin Chamber of Commerce Business Conference and Consumer Expo. "Banks look at that. It's all about cash, and most businesses don't have enough cash."

More than a third of small businesses in Nevada have been operating for more than five years, suggesting a strong and stable business group, the Nevada Commission on Economic Development reported in 2004. Nevada, and specifically Las Vegas, have been ranked as the best place to start a business by several publications, including Entrepreneur Magazine.

John Gentile, vice president of Desert Community Bank, said the most important criteria for getting a loan to start a new business is to come in with a solid business plan.

"You've got to sell me on the idea," the banker said. "Not only that, but the people that are going to run the business, the principals, I look at their experience in the industry. You don't want to have someone from construction getting into the ice cream business."

Hispanics account for about half of the immigration growth in the United States and represent $350 billion in buying power, Walter Ulloa, chairman and chief executive officer of Spanish-language media company Entravision Communications Corp., said at the Latin Chamber business expo.

The 490,000 Hispanics in Las Vegas have $7 billion of buying power, he said, and the population is expected to increase 36 percent to 667,000 by 2011.

The line between small and big business will blur as more entrepreneurs form free-agent contracts with large companies as a natural response to the demise of traditional lifetime employment, the Intuit study predicts.

Over the next 10 years, "free agents" will thrive with less job security -- they will have clients, not employers -- but, in a trade-off, they will exert far more control over their time and working conditions.

"Generation X watched their baby-boomer parents being downsized or outsourced and they realized they don't want to be there at the tail end of corporate life," Dennehy said.

Gilberto Cisneros, president and CEO of Denver-based Chamber of the Americas, said that "times are indeed changing with international trade." There are 25 million people on either side of the U.S.-Mexico border between San Diego and Brownsville, Texas, he said.

"Many immigrants say this is a great country, but they would rather be working at home," he said. "You have incredible opportunity in Las Vegas with international trade because every restaurant I go into, I hear different languages."

The nonnative Hispanic community is an essential part of Southern Nevada's economy, creating more than 200,000 jobs, $15.5 billion in output and $829 million in state and local revenues, according to a 2003 report from the Center for Business and Economic Research at University of Nevada, Las Vegas.