Patricia Green | 'Failure Was Not an Option'
Monday, December 11, 2006; Page D05
Patricia Green knew at age 15 that she had a knack for styling hair. She braided her friends' locks into neat rows and glued in their weaves like a pro. At the same time Green was finishing Oxon Hill High School, she also completed cosmetology school.
Salon work paid good money, and Green continued to do hair through the 1980s. Styling straight silky dos, finger waves, soft curls and everything in between enabled her to study business management at the University of Maryland and later to pursue an MBA at Strayer University.
Upon graduation, she took jobs that used her degree, doing payroll and human resources training. But corporate work bored Green, she says, and she eventually took a pay cut to return to her first love. In 1997, she began teaching at a beauty school. Over the next six years she was promoted to registrar, then financial aid coordinator and later education director. She also kept a few clients on the side -- women who told Green they didn't trust anyone else to do their hair.
With her MBA and hands-on experience, Green thought she could operate her own beauty school. In early 2003, she found a location in Alexandria, where she saw little competition.
She purchased teaching materials and used her savings and credit cards to buy hair dryers, shampoo bowls and curlers. Green had a name for the school, Spectrum Beauty Academy, but she didn't have enough money to get the doors open.
"I realized that I needed a lot more capital," Green recalled. "I was willing to do whatever at the time. Failure was not an option."
Deep in debt, trying to escape credit cards' high interest rates, she began looking for loans online. That's where she found the Ethiopian Community Development Council's Enterprise Development Group microloan program. She qualified for a five-year, $25,000 loan, which she used to purchase office equipment, stylist stations and supplies for applying facials -- and to pay off her credit card debt. The EDG loan's interest rate was 9 percent, several points lower than Green's credit cards.
The loan application process was simple, she said. They pulled her credit report, discussed her plans for the beauty school and required her to put up some of the equipment she purchased as collateral. And after Spectrum opened for business in 2003, EDG stayed involved, Green said. Staffers told her about an accounting workshop, where she learned more about how to manage the school's books.
Annual enrollment at the beauty academy has reached about 100, and Green employs eight part- and full-time instructors.
"It was a lifelong dream finally realized," she said on recent morning while passing through the beauty academy's lilac and lime-green hallways. Through one door an instructor was visible, explaining the hair dye color scale. "The number one is the darkest color. It signifies the intensity," she told a half-dozen students in smocks.
Green closed the classroom door and said she is thinking of opening a second location.
Until last year, she said, she continued to style a few of her old clients' hair. It was hard to let go, but Green has referred them to her former students.
Osama Elkhawad | A Business Investment With Valuable Mileage
Monday, December 11, 2006; Page D05
Osama Elkhawad can tell you how much every piece of machinery cost in his small auto-repair center, located across from a McDonald's and next door to a dry cleaner in Arlington.
Numbers tend to stick in Elkhawad's head: In his native Sudan, he was an accountant. But when he immigrated to the United States in 1996, he had to start over. He began working at low-paying jobs and inched his way up -- delivering pizzas, working as a cashier, managing a gas station. He eventually picked up some temporary work that used his accounting skills, but that business didn't hold up during the years of recession.
Elkhawad wanted to be an entrepreneur. Repairing cars had always been a hobby and after managing the gas station, he thought he could successfully run his own business. He found an auto-repair shop with low rent in Annandale, and used his savings and one credit card to open Barcroft Auto Center.
"Then I [was] busy learning all these thing -- mechanic classes, inspection," said Elkhawad, 41.
His main business was annual inspections. Elkhawad soon realized he could make much more if he could conduct emissions testing, since most people have both tests done together. "If I don't have the emissions machine, they will not come to me," Elkhawad said.
The emissions-testing machine he needed cost $40,000. He had to borrow the money.
It was easy for Elkhawad to calculate the potential profit from that investment, predicting a client base at least equal to the number of customers whose cars he had inspected who also needed emissions testing. Bankers didn't see it that simply.
"That time if I go to any banks, they would not give it -- because 'You don't have a credit history, you don't have a green card,' " he said.
In 2001, Elkhawad turned to the Ethiopian Community Development Council's Enterprise Development Group. EDG checked Elkhawad's credit history, which wasn't stellar. Sometimes, he says, he was so busy he forgot to make credit card payments. But EDG takes character into account, too, and noted the intensity that still drives him to work 17-hour days seven days a week. He got a $35,000 loan at 8 percent interest.
He was never late on those payments, he says. For one thing, if he hadn't paid by the 15th of every month, he would get a call from an EDG staff member around lunchtime. Elkhawad would then drive 10 minutes to EDG's welcoming Arlington office, drop his check and chat with the staff, most of whom are also immigrants.
Last year, Elkhawad found a gas station/auto center for sale and went back to EDG, hoping to finance a second location. With a new $35,000 loan, he bought the property as well as an $8,000 scanner to help diagnose car problems. EDG now has a direct link to Elkhawad's checking account that automatically deducts his monthly payment.
As his business grows, Elkhawad may be able to qualify for a bank loan at an interest rate lower than the one he pays EDG, but he says he prefers to do business with the microfinance institution.
"I had a very bad experience with a bank. Every time I tried, they said no," he says. "I said, 'I will never go to a bank for a loan or a credit card.'"
Today Elkhawad has four employees, all from Africa. In addition to English and Arabic, he's learning Spanish to better communicate with his customers, who like him, are mostly immigrants.
"If somebody come, and they don't speak English," he says, "I can help them."
Machyar Gleuenta | Artist's Dream Becomes 'Half-Paradise'
Monday, December 11, 2006; Page D05
The artist's studio is tucked into the converted garage of a two-story home in Springfield. On a six-foot-tall wooden easel rests a well-used palette, covered in gobs of muted blues, grays and maroons. Several large oil paintings, carefully boxed, lean against the opposite wall. A sleeping bag, microwave oven and refrigerator are a few steps away.
The crowded room is home and work space for painter Machyar Gleuenta, an Indonesian immigrant trying to make a profitable business out of his art.
"Having a career in fine arts is probably one of the least desirable careers to have," Gleuenta said with a laugh. "This is kind of like half-paradise."
Gleuenta grew up in rural Sumatra, where his parents were subsistence farmers who tended their rice patties with the help of a water buffalo. "That's how we survived," he said. But what he wanted to do was paint, a craft he learned by working for his uncle, an artist.
So he moved to the Indonesian capital of Jakarta and spent as much time as he could around the U.S. Embassy, hoping to meet an American who could help him emigrate and advance his study of fine art.
From some university officials who had come for a convention, he learned about scholarship programs for foreign art students and applied. Ten years ago, at the age of 24, he came to the United States and studied on scholarships at the Maine College of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. Upon graduation he launched MK Fine Arts and began looking for commissions and sales venues. In the meantime, he worked as a plumber by day and painted at night.
His big break came in 2004, when Georgia State University commissioned him to paint a portrait of civil rights stalwart, former Atlanta mayor and U.N. ambassador Andrew Young. But such high-profile work isn't easy to come by. Soon after the Young portrait was unveiled last year, Gleuenta began looking for financial support -- and learned from a Somali refugee group about the Ethiopian Community Development Council's Enterprise Development Group.
The business plan Gleuenta showed EDG proposed buying additional supplies and marketing MK Fine Arts online. EDG lent him $15,000, using a loan fund it administers for the Office of Refugee Resettlement. Gleuenta used some of the money to have half a dozen of his paintings professionally scanned at a $650 apiece, so he could make high-quality prints and marketing materials. He also used some of the money to rent a car to transport the paintings to New York, where the scanning company is located. He spent a few hundred dollars on software to build a Web site ( http:/
"To get it done right, there's no way around it," Gleuenta said.
Paying back the loan was challenging for Gleuenta, whose income these days comes from selling paintings and teaching occasional art courses. He was late a few times, but he called EDG and was granted a grace period. He said he paid off the 18-month loan last week.
"It is very fickle as far as an income base, but I'm not worried about that anymore," he said. "My concentration now is to produce good art and people will come."
Sometimes, they do come. Recently an Indonesian businessman sent him a letter in Bahasa Indonesia, Gleuenta's native language, commissioning three large paintings with tsunami-related themes. Gleuenta, who lost 19 relatives in the 2004 tsunami, immediately accepted.
