By GREGORY SOLMAN
Contributing Writer - Inland Socal
Albert Renteria summarizes his advisory meeting with the Small Business Administration in May in Washington, D.C. as follows: "Economy, economy, and the economy."
The president and CEO of Perris-based ARRenteria, who received the SBA's Veteran Business Champion Award on June 2, can sum his own business philosophy equally pointedly. He is, according to his trademarked logo, "strategically driven, logistically minded."
Renteria explains that small businesses can use computers, networks, and communications as the substitute "entourage" which mostly burden larger competitors.
"Technology systems allow us to do reach-back capacity without the cost of moving manpower," he explains, referring the military concept of reducing the ratio of support personnel to troops in the field. "When resource dollars do not exist, technology can level the playing field and expand your reach without moving parts."
Military logistics are in Renteria's blood. In 2000, in launching a non-profit Operation Interdependence, he helped develop the standardization of packages sent by civilians to military personnel in the field overseas so they "get to the grunts," as Renteria recalls. "They didn't have the manpower. We needed to send less and reach more."
A Chicago native, Renteria followed his older brother into the Marines in 1974 at age 17 and stayed 26 years, retiring a Chief Warrant Officer 4, specializing in manpower and personnel. When he announced his retirement "everyone thought I was kidding," Renteria recalls. "I consider myself a servant to the country. I love giving back."
Renteria put his military pension to use for working capital and became the sole proprietor of Albert R. Renteria Co., specializing in Web development, business management, E-commerce and consultancy. Classified as a service-disabled veteran owned business and a benevolent organization for its sponsorship of the Southwest Veterans' Business Resource Center, Renteria relishes the opportunity to help other veterans get their businesses marching along the right path.
He encourages them to take advantage of a 1999 Public Law 106-50 which sets a goal of 23 percent of bids going to small businesses, and a 3 percent subset of all Federal procurement opportunities going to service-disabled veteran small businesses.
Even though veterans have worked for the government during their service years, "typically they don't consider the government a potential customer" when seeking contracts for their small businesses, Renteria contends. A 2009 SBA report card shows despite the goals of the 1999 law, "they fell slightly short," says Renteria. He points out that missing the 3 percent set aside mark by just 1.1 percent left some $6 billion in Federal contracts on the table. "We have to raise awareness among the small guys to strategically chase these larger and bigger contracts."
Renteria, whose own Perris-based business has Federal procurement contracts with the Army base in Fort Bragg, N.C., and Eglin Air Force Base in Florida, says technology makes it possible for virtually any size business to work anywhere in the country, if not the world. He says contracts on Federal property have no local residency requirements, empowering businesses from all over to compete.
Adapting a lesson from the 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut--when vital paper records were destroyed with the Marines--he advocates such business practices as online data storage.
"If you are reliant on a piece of paper, and you don't use a laptop to access information from anywhere, you are spending too much time and money tracking your data," he says, citing it as another manpower issue. "We're in the era where the business owner cannot afford an entourage."
Renteria was nominated for the SBA award by James Spee, Ph.D., a professor and director of graduate programs at the University of Redlands, and by Adam Rogers, a project manager for Hensel Phelps Construction, which has won military construction contract work.
As many as 40 packages were submitted for various categories, said Rachel Baranick, deputy district director of the SBA's district office in Santa Ana, and Renteria prevailed because of his involvement in several interleaving categories, championing of small business, for actively supporting legislative and regulatory business that would help small business, for his work with the American Legion's Business Task force and his role on the advisory committee on Veterans Business Development and the California Department of Veteran Affairs Disabled Veteran Business Enterprise Advisory Council.
"The veteran community is critical to small business," Baranick explains. "We find that a quarter of all veterans have expressed an interest in starting one. Renteria's center in Perris serves an underserved community. He's training them on how to start and train for a small business and bringing them resources and access to capital."
"He's a very passionate man when it comes to veterans," says Baranick, adding the 8 percent of SBA loans are currently going to veterans. "He's well deserving of the award."
Renteria hopes that his civic-mindedness works in concert with the concept of building community in the business sense, such that social capital becomes as important as working capital. "I try to instill the attitude that the business side is not more important than what you put back into the community," he says. "In fact, business is about building community."
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