City opens business resource center in Barelas

To promote greater collaboration between two government offices and act as a one-stop shop for questions from local businesses, the city of Albuquerque on Thursday opened the doors of its business resource center — the new home for the city’s Small Business Office and the New Mexico Minority Business Development Agency.

The grand opening hosted public and private officials, including Mayor Tim Keller and Sen. Martin Heinrich, who both spoke at the event commemorating the new center at 700 Fourth SW in the Barelas neighborhood.

Max Gruner, the city’s Economic Development Department director, said the business resource center will provide “wrap-around services” for local and minority-owned businesses.

That includes services such as providing information on procurement and access to capital, and answering general questions for business owners in their beginning and more established stages, he said.

“Really, there is no sunlight between the two programs,” Gruner said.

The MBDA, funded by the U.S. Department of Commerce but operated by the city of Albuquerque, started in 2020 as an agency focused on serving minority-owned businesses with revenue of more than half a million dollars.

The agency has in recent years gotten rid of the revenue and ethnic requirements and, like the city’s Small Business Office, offers services from procurement to one-on-one meetings focused on forming business plans and social media strategies, said MBDA Director Gabriela Marques.

Whereas the Small Business Office focuses on small businesses operating in Albuquerque, the MBDA works with businesses from across the state, she said.The MBDA earlier this year opened business centers in Las Cruces and Las Vegas, New Mexico.

“Our scope of work — it’s larger,” Marques said. “But now that we’re in the same building, it’s easy to just be like, ‘Hey, talk to the Small Business Office about this.’”

Marques said the new space will allow for “growth internally,” like hiring more business advisers. She said the new office has room for other partner organizations to “come and use office hours so that people can feel like this is their space.”

Marques said that MBDA’s services are free and the agency works with “all types of businesses,” excluding those involved in federally illegal sectors such as cannabis.

The center will be open weekdays from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., Gruner said. He encouraged businesses to take advantage of the expertise both agencies can offer.

“If we can provide some expertise and some guidance to simplify a process that appears to have 17 steps, and to bring it down to three understandable, manageable steps, then we feel successful,” Gruner said.