THE MARTIN MOTOR GROUP
DOWNTOWN L.A’S HOPE FOR MANUFACTURING: SOUTH PARK L.A
This recession is not over: Some sectors are showing signs of growth-amazing recovery-some sectors sluggish, and the next sector to crash: To devour more wealth and savings, to unglue, unhinge, and demolish the life savings of thousands of investors will be the commercial real-estate market.
It will plunge as sure as rain falls from the sky.
So what is the solution to this? To the Macro economic environment and the Micro economic environment?
Cooperation, connectivity, and the renewal of mercantilism: Of a form of high-tech, high-level, “I trust you, you trust me,” bartering. Alliance building, strategic partnerships, aggregation of forces (businesses, personalities, and organizations), and a willingness to accept the concept that so many Americans shy away from as a viable mode of business: Warfare. Total warfare.
There are enemies-they exist as concepts (I am almost no one man’s enemy): Conventional thinking, delays, anemic policy making, obtuse officials, fearful capital, and mindless, inane C-Level decision makers many of whom, instead of being swept away by a recession they helped cause, have been shifted to another company, or worse elevated.
Capital must flow to innovation and innovative people and organizations congregate together in areas: South Park Los Angeles is one.
Its the next Tribeca- Its most certainly a micro (veiled) Silicon Valley.
This recession will come and it will go in the next three years-in the next three years-through the recession, exponential growth will be found in sustainability, green-companies, green-tech related companies, and-yes-dare I say it: Manufacturing. Manufacturing is a different animal that what it once was.
Its nimble, its out of garages and small warehouses, its fast, replicatable, and getting less expensive to do: This recession has cracked the delicate egg of Union domination and corporate greed-its the moment for America (for Los Angeles), to seize and begin to develop rapid-cycle, niche manufacturing.
MANUFACTURING IS THE OLD NEW. WATCH SOUTH PARK L.A: ITS SOON GOING TO BE A HUB OF MICRO-MANUFACTURING ENABLED BY ITS INNOVATIVE SMALL-BUSINESS OWNERS CONCENTRATED IN TECH AND CONTENT CREATION, AND INTERNATIONALLY THROUGH GLOBAL SOURCING OF COMPONENTS.
We’re not at a dead-end, its a cul-de-sac: The tide will turn and lift boats powered by entrepreneurs, risk takers, and visionaries.
Extending the life cycle of a product and the importance of personality,ideas, emotions, strategy, excellent design, and CONNECTIVITY
Evolution of products used to be long-tail: Six years from design, manufacturing, and sales. That’s changed: radically. Product development can be done anywhere: R+D can be done anywhere. So-so design can be done in many places and that means products evolve and get better faster ergo-shorter, tighter life cycles.
The market place demands more-expects more-and gets more. Prices fall and rise based on commodities and the changing policies of governments, the willingness of private money and institutions to invest, and policy: All those factors are variable.
This means almost anything-anything, can be commoditized: Businesses are no longer applauded just for having a well-made product and sales teams don’t just win on ‘product knowledge’ alone.
What’s left? What can’t be dragged down into the morass of commodification and what questions should you ask about yourself and your company?
- Personality: Do you have an attractive personality- are you a magnet? Is this reflected, infused, in your brand and company? Are you able to connect people with other people? Do people call you. Do people ask youto assist them, solve problems, and get things done? Is all this integrated into your companies’ brand and image. Personality decreases the disaster of commodification. Can your personality, difuse through your organization, renown, encourage consumers to purchase your products just past the conventional widom of when the product’s life-cycle is supposed to be over? Do you believe you can remake your personality? You can: Mirror and study attractive personalities.
- Ideas: Do you have great out-of-the-box ideas: Are they so compelling and powerful that they drive alliances and bring people together to assist you with your dream-make that dream their own, and, in partnership make real, what is your vision? Do you have many good ideas? Do you write them down? Do you share them with others-bringing them closer to you? Can your ideas singularly improve enough peoples’ lives and businesses that what you sell, and the company you own turn the commodification tide and extend your product’s life-cycle?
- Emotions: Do you care? Stop for a moment: Ponder this- Do you care? Do you empathize? Are you able to emote powerfully positive energy that compells others to join with you in bold visions-are you emotionally in tune with others? Do they feel better when you are around: Energized, cheered-up, grateful for the time they spend with you? Bottom-line: Do they feel inspired. No force, no cheaper, faster, better manufacturer or company can compete with a leader who can inspire his/her team under any conditions, threats, foes, or situations. The power to inspire= the power to strike down the tidal-force of copy-catism. Inspiration is the ultimate brand and as rare as the rarest diamond.
- Strategy: Do you drive your choices in business strategically? Do you map your business out? Goal post, do you put yourself in another man’s shoes and try to bring enough good to the table that conventional deals, contracts, and ways of doing things-which led to this recession-which led to this recession-can be undone through force of out-of-the-box ‘win-win’ strategic planning?
- Excellent Design: And here is the shield and sword of a companies’ ability to go to war with mass-volume-hydra headed, far flung purveyors of rapidlly produced product: Exquisite design. Do you have on your team or in your universe players able to up-brand and extend the life cycle of your companies’ products with innovative, trans formative designs-over and over again?
- CONNECTIVITY: Can you bring people together when you have very few resources and execute the goal? No man is an island-none of us are perfect. CONNECTIVITY is not “making connections”-that was pre-recession babble- CONNECTIVITY is the combination of 1-3 above: Personality, ideas, and emotions. CONNECTIVITY IS YOUR (AND YOUR COMPANIES’) WARRIOR-It can’t be beat. And maybe only one in 100,000 people have the power of CONNECTIVITY. Seek them out-and stay stuck to them like epoxy.
South Park L.A: So Cal’s Sillicon Valley & Ayala Park: Asia’s Silicon Valley
Forbes & M Motors: Green manufacturing will rise in DT Los Angeles: Three year goal post
I can’t stop learning because within the limitations of my points-of-view and sense that I must engage actively in the small world I inhabit: DT L.A (South Park L.A), I meet so many people, so talented that force me to re-think concepts and precepts and to do new things in new ways: Patterns that I would not normally follow.
I am vitalized by my vision and my passions and trying to include all points of view-stay fresh-agile: Even when it doesn’t feel good: Digesting the unpalatable meal of humility to get along to go along. It is however nutritional and brings me, my team, my family, and the hundreds of future employees I hire and care for, one step closer to the great dream and the grand goal of building up DT L.A’s job base through green, all electric, zero-emission manufacturing of full scale vehicles.
Where? Not in some far flung industrial center-not in the outer-reaching of our incredible city-of this megalopolis, which Eli Broad, Richard Riordan, Mayor Tom Bradley, and others re-envisioned to have a central core.
M Motors, within three years, will manufacture in DT L.A and, like American Apparel-though with some core differences-components will be brought in from abroad to some degree, hundreds of men and women from Boyle Heights to South Central, hands coarse, full of un-used latent talents, even aging, will rise and work and see from their own labors our inner-cities’: Our core-city’s rebirth.
I am not a fanatic nor am I a hyper-idealist, nor am I an enemy of profit: Raised in dealerships and distributorships under the benevolent but insistent hand of my father: (age 6, 10 new vocabulary words a day-flash cards-until I was 18, from age 8 and on, reciting back to him The Economist Magazine, at age 10 through 18, forced debates-which I relished- at the dinner table about three subjects-politics, business, and values): I am a realist, who having been raised by a pragmatist who did many ‘impossible’ things, many times, taught me that to dream entrepreneurial dreams that combined a sense of social-justice with a strong eye on the bottom-line and ROI, and on profits (“look out for your workers-they have families-and they also have dreams,”-one of many things he would say to me), are not incongruous-they are complimentary.
There are many businesses to be in and for now and the foreseeable future, my company: South Park Development Group, bannered under Forbes Legacy Ventures LLC will develop a Dealership-Distributorship with expansionary goals and be a Business Advisory and biz-accelerator (it’s not my company-just like the consumer owns companies by virtue of buying their products-Forbes is owned by three-God willing soon to be four of my compadres, warriors, who through sleet or snow, under cover of darkness and in the full sunlight of a bright day, have stood by the vision, and maintained their equipoise even under the most egregious insults to our vision).
The seeds of Forbes were laid by my father: Raised in the flat-lands of Kansas, on a farm, whose father was loved and respected for his honor and drive (inherited by my father, and a goal-post for me) brilliant of mind, he gained degrees to George Town and Cambridge University, England, and, reading Nights of Arabia, married a young Spanish-Japanese beauty in Morocco, flew off to Asia (remember, if you can, when Pan Am was Pan Am!) and still, nearly penniless, went to Asia to seek and build a fortune and leave a legacy.
He built a fortune and he lost it. He built a legacy and I grasped it and asked others to join with me to build it.
It’ s a whisper on the wind, an echo in the night, a still-distant drum beat: But if you listen carefully enough, you can hear the beat of the drums getting louder and the sing-song cadence of hopeful birds chanting “rebirth.”
For my family, for my allies, for my team, for myself, and for my city: Late nights and early mornings until all the second-raters and nay-sayers see from their small apertures full-scale, powerful, vehicle manufacturing rise up in South Park L.A.
There was a mayor known for burning the midnight oil for the sake of his vision for the city (Downtown central library, integration, equality)-Mayor Tom Bradley. There was a Mayor “Tough enough to turn L.A around…” and he did, Richard Riordan-both were known for ‘late nights and early mornings.’
When I was a little boy (6-12) in my blue pajamas my father (he raised me-I was raised by my father alone), would review the vocab-flash cards before bed, read me a book (The Fountain Head, Atlas Shrugged, Shakespeare, the list is endless), and then go to his study and work. When I woke, blurry-eyed, but excited at a new day (nothing like the first wink of sunlight), my father was at the breakfast table, reading the Financial Times, muttering to himself, and watching the Telex machine for orders-he was a dealer and a distributorship (telex machine?-look it up, lol).
Late nights and early mornings.
Prime Movers and Dream Killers
What defines a prime mover? Creators, producers, manufacturers, originators-they singly and in alliances, are the world’s engine.
And the world does not welcome prime movers-it is not in collective man’s nature to admire prime movers: It is prime movers who admire man- individual men who, through their will and determination, through unyielding drive, move the world.
In South Park L.A, my freinds are Prime Movers: Rasmus Lee (SRH Holdings, PRE Brokerage, Hygge), Joe Montalbano (Nylon www.nylon.la), Fred Hakim (www.bottlerock.net), Terrel Owens- South Park L.A’s own resident artist. The list is longer.
I can’t claim to be a prime mover- I aspire to be a prime mover.
To want to create, to produce to pick up a legacy laid down by my father and build it into a legacy my children can be proud of requires tremendous optimism and faith in my fellow man.
Faith in follow-up, in other’s vigor, and vitality: Faith, actually, that those who do not aspire to be prime movers, at least give a degree of courtesy and consideration to those who hold those aspirations.
My father is a prime-mover: He built when other’s said it was impossible. He drove deeply into new markets as South East Asia’s distributor for Caterpillar. He supported many, many young men who had aspirations financially and with his joie de vivre, his advice, his care, and his example. He lost all his wealth on a bad bet (pound sterling 1992).
I have found almost no other men with these same qualities-until recently-and this man, who has himself lived many lives and worn many hats, reminds me most of my father: He is brilliant in business and brilliant at giving advice, lifting, buoyantly, one’s dreams whilst keeping them alive by keeping me grounded: I hope, one day to announce him as CEO of this little company-of Forbes, of M Motors, of the legacy.
He has manufactured, he has been in finance, he has activated, accomplished, and achieved: With him I believe that all that is possible for Forbes can be made facts-on-the-ground-real as rock.
My father is the man to whom I dedicate my aspirations because he never said “impossible, untenable, or unreachable” to me- knowing those words are like daggers, dream-killers. Instead he advised on how to make possible, tenable, reachable, my goals.
My father is no pie-in-the-sky idealist: He was a pragmatic, realistic businessman: He is now a veteran of the business world, giving advice-which I take. But so much more- a lifter of other men, who believes that will- sheer bloody will, can bend events in a direction otherwise anticipated.
I pick up with my unyielding, loyal team, where he left off: Opening a dealership of zero-emission, all electric vehicles in South Park L.A (Downtown L.A) called M Motors (MM).
The drive and the dream is to one day manufacture in DT L.A-to roll off a manufacturing plant cars, trucks: All electric, zero-emission vehicles, and, in doing so, reignite DT L.A’s manufacturing base through green technology.
I have been told by many men in middle-management that this dream is untenable: One actually scoffed at me-“manufacturing in L.A…vehicles!?”Grinning at his own brilliance-at his sheer cynicism and ambivalence to the hope of developing a broad, new base of jobs for the jobless (why, one wonders, would a man stick so deeply into another man the dagger of pessimism?
But this is what I have been told by giants, men whose names you would swiftly recognize as best-of-breed in the L.A business and spiritual world ( a preist whose name is on many tounges for his proven accomplishements:“Tough, but possible, a long road-but a journey worth taking. You’ve come so far, so fast, don’t let anyone stop you.”
I won’t. I need help and I’m getting it and by hook or by crook the legacy will live on. I have a son-and like my father his name is Martin. There are three Martins’ and one legacy to lift up, burnish and pass on: The Forbes legacy.
I know my weaknesses-they are my burdens and my demons-there are so many of them: And I wish I was less rash, less brash, and better at so many things.
I know that there is a man whose strength, experience, and love of life-whose business acumen: (all attributes of my father), may mentor me, help me, and work with me to bind that legacy which is just now a whisper carried by a fragile wind, into a rock upon which thousands can depend on for gainful employment, that my father one day from heaven can look down and see the brand he built, build men, and that my son may carry forward into the bright upland hills of greater achievements built on green, sustainable distributorships and manufacturing of all electric, non polluting vehicles.
“The longer I live, the more I am certain that the great difference between the great and the insignificant, its energy- invincible determination- a purpose once fixed, and then death or victory.” – Sir Thomas Foxwell Buxton
Bottle Rock: Much more than just wine and food: Value driven, based on a labor of love
Bottlerock: Not just a bar, not just an owner
I’ve spent a little time at Bottle Rock, on the north-west corner of Hope and 11th street: Last week, I had lunch there and was afforded the opportunity of chatting with the chef, staff, and with Fred Hakim and his brother.
Here is my take-away: Bottle Rock is not just a bar, it’s Down town’s own corner- a hybrid wine bar and eatery that focuses on pleasing your palate whilst providing a truly comprehensive choice of wines and liqueurs at value-prices.
And, well, Fred’s not just an owner: He’s a proprietor-he cares passionately about his stock-in-trade and speaks with a glimmer about what he does know-and, interestingly, what he doesn’t know- quick to point out that there is a world of knowledge that his staff brings him, from which he can grow as business man and as an individual.
That’s huge: We are living through a recession partially caused by the great and the good because they failed to see in their work-force, in their teams…the great and the good, instead settling for B’s and banking on bonuses.
Fred spoke with passion tonight (our second encounter titled: The Adventures of Fred and Martin….that’s another story for another post) about how his team teaches and touches him and about how his children nourish and enliven him-their effervescence, curiosity, and achievements.
And so a connection: Two men striving in Down Town Los Angeles through a tough patch who love their families, and love to learn-knowing that there is so much others can teach them. It felt right: It felt natural.
Look, that’s the point: Values. We have to nurture those businesses and the teams, and proprietors in our Down Town L.A that bring to the table the kind of values that we wish to ourselves embody.
Bottle Rock is a terrific eatery and a smashing wine bar with a superb selection. But its so much more than that: It’s the story of a man big enough to build and to risk to add value to our neighborhood-to our Central City, with the kind of values through action that all Down Town L.A can be proud of: The willingness to listen, learn, and labor.
We should join together and go often to Bottle Rock-baseline, it’s excellent, and then, well, there’s the best reason of all: It’s the right thing to do.
Thanks for the adventure, Fred, and I look forward to the next one.
Bottlerock: http://www.bottlerock.net
Our readership #’s
Our Readership Numbers
Have fallen precipitously: that’s what happens when you one doesn’t post once-twice, daily.
That’s the sharp-end of the sword when it comes to blogs.
Current average readership last week for this blog: 1222 . It’s a very steep decline (from 1912)that can only be reversed by posting regularly-which, we will soon do.
Reason for not posting: The whole team is engaged in vitalizing our efforts regarding Green Motors L.A and other projects-blogs can get a bit battered in the process.
Downtown L.A Business will be back to blogging about many topics of interest and concern soon-hopefully, today.
GREEN MOTORS L.A
Martin Cavanaugh Porter
These last few days for my team, have been spent tirelessely battling to develop enough resources to begin transforming Los Angeles in relation to zero-emissions vehicles and reducing pollution.
By degrees, in fits and starts, transformation is becoming the seed of fact.
Seeds grow into trees-oaks, mighty enough to withstand the billowing winds of mediocraty and indifference.
I will keep you posted but all signs point to “GO.”
Downtown L.A's Business Blog 
leave a comment