New Orleans (June 15, 2012) – Capital One Bank, in partnership with the Urban League of Greater New Orleans, today announced the second annual “Grow Gentilly” small business growth plan competition to help small businesses in the Gentilly area of New Orleans grow and create jobs.

The winner of the Grow Gentilly competition will receive a cash award of $10,000. The contestants who finish second and third will receive $7,000 and $3,000, respectively. The top three also will receive technical and professional assistance to enhance their businesses.

“At Capital One Bank, we are committed to Investing for Good in greater New Orleans, connecting our company’s people and financial resources to education, financial literacy, and small business and workforce development,” said Tammy Boyd, Business Banking Market Credit Executive for greater New Orleans. “The Grow Gentilly competition is a great example of how we bring Investing for Good to life for businesses in Gentilly, a historic and important part of New Orleans and the focus of Capital One Bank’s philanthropic efforts in New Orleans. We’re pleased to partner with the Urban League of Greater New Orleans for the second year in a row to offer this competition.”

To be eligible for the Grow Gentilly competition, businesses and their owners must meet the following key criteria:
• Business revenues in the most recent fiscal year must have been $1 million or less.
• The applicant must have owned the business since before Aug. 31, 2012.
• The business must reside in zip code 70122.
• The applicant/owner must demonstrate the potential or desire to grow and create jobs in the Gentilly community.

The competition is divided into two rounds. In the first, applicants will complete and submit an online form to provide a comprehensive overview of their business, including its mission and vision, products and services offered, management plan, marketing strategy and other key information. Each of the applicants then will be assigned a Capital One business banker who will provide insight and help the applicant fine-tune the application. The applicants will then be expected to re-submit their applications after the one-on-on business banker consultation by Aug. 31. Six finalists then will be announced on Sept. 15 and will compete in the second and final round on Oct. 15, during which each contender will make an 8-10 minute business presentation in front of a panel of community and business leaders. The cash awards will go to the owners of the three businesses whose plans are judged by the panel to be the most creative, innovative and likely to succeed and create jobs in the Gentilly area.

The deadline to submit the first-round online application is 5 p.m., July 31, 2012. Applications will be accepted at www.cybergrants.com/capitalone/growgentilly. The site provides detailed information about the competition, eligibility guidelines and a pre-screening checklist. The revised applications must be submitted no later than Aug. 31.

In the inaugural Grow Gentilly competition last year, the winner was the Munch Factory restaurant, owned by Chef Jordan Ruiz and his wife, Alexis. When their restaurant was selected as the winner of the competition, the Ruiz’s were overjoyed, and they knew exactly where they’d be investing their winnings—in an additional industrial-sized refrigerator. “For us to have the money to get the extra refrigeration was the biggest breath of fresh air we could imagine,” Alexis Ruiz said. The Ruiz’s also plan on taking advantage of Capital One’s technology and marketing counseling services to help grow their business even further.

“Grow Gentilly” is part of Capital One Bank’s Gentilly Community-Based Initiative (CBI), a multi-faceted community revitalization project created by Capital One to serve as a catalyst for the redevelopment of the Gentilly neighborhoods in New Orleans. The Gentilly CBI represents a strategic investment by Capital One Bank to enhance and expand economic opportunities for families and businesses in Gentilly.

The New Orleans Business Alliance is focusing on changing the image New Orleans presents to businesses that are thinking of relocating or expanding to the city. “A lot of our growth has been birthed out of buzz,” Rodrick Miller, president and CEO of the alliance, said at a luncheon Wednesday hosted by the Association for Corporate Growth. “New Orleans is cool and hip, but there’s more to it than that.”

He said many people often associate New Orleans with Bourbon Street, jazz music and the port, but they don’t think about the new things coming to the city like the film industry and technology companies. He said it’s important to show businesses how successful they can be in the city and the emerging markets that have found support in the area. The alliance is working on lowering barriers and making the city a great place to do business.

“As we started to peel back the layers of the onion we realized that businesses that knew how to work the system got through the system,” Miller added. “Businesses that didn’t have as many connections or were not familiar with the process struggled to get through.”

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The board of the New Orleans Business Alliance approved a plan Wednesday that creates a framework through which companies that want to apply to the city for incentives would be evaluated and establishes the Orleans Parish economic development agency as the starting point for such activity. Under the plan, the Business Alliance, a public-private partnership created in August 2010 to recruit and retain business in the city, will analyze and evaluate requests for economic development incentives from various would-be investors in Orleans Parish. The plan is the first of its kind in New Orleans, where a formal method of evaluating requests for public financing has never existed.

“This process provides a real level of clarity, a level of transparency that has never existed in the city around public dollars,” Rodrick Miller, chief executive of the Business Alliance, said at the group’s meeting.

The Business Alliance will use its own economic impact model on each investment proposal to determine whether a project qualifies for incentives and which would best suit it. Based on that analysis, the agency will make nonbinding recommendations to the city boards that have the ability to offer incentives like tax increment financing, sales tax sharing agreements and property tax abatements.

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The city is poised to spend $10 million to restore the Milne Boys Home, but there’s no word yet on how it will be used once the repairs are made.

It’s been close to three decades since the home has had any residents. The campus was used as a meeting space for community groups until Hurricane Katrina.

The Franklin Avenue campus was built in 1932 after it merged with the Municipal Boys Home, formerly called the Waifs’ Home for Colored Boys. Work planned on the property includes interior demolition and the securing of two cottages and the administration building.

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Though the largest number of SBA loan requests continues to be for new businesses in the retail and service industry, the SBA district office has seen growing interest from manufacturing companies outside of New Orleans focusing in international trade, said Poree.

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So when we saw Pepperoni Ray’s (3807 Frenchmen St.), you can imagine our excitement! Pizza is back in Gentilly and you definitely won’t be disappointed in Pepperoni Ray’s, our new Local Eatery Spotlight!

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Small businesses that can’t afford the 50 percent commission fee that companies like Groupon and LivingSocial typically charge don’t have to be left out of the daily deal craze. With Signpost, local merchants can run targeted deals that reach consumers through a network of more than 1,200 local publishers without paying a dime in commission costs or exorbitant fees.

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Corporate Realty Retail Specialist Casey Burka reported yesterday that Sav-A-Lot is opening two new stores this weekend in New Orleans. One in New Orleans East at 9999 Lake Forest Blvd. and one in Gentilly at 4726 Paris Ave.

Save-A-Lot, a wholly owned subsidiary of SuperValu Inc., one of the nation’s leading hard-discount grocery chains, which operates more than 1,300 stores in 39 states from Maine to California.

Click here to watch Casey Burka video update on YouTube

Figures from April 1 to June 30 of last year show workers here made $873. The New Orleans are also had and the highest employment with 507,527 people holding jobs, according to the Louisiana Department of Labor’s Second Quarter 2011 Employment and Wages Report.

The average New Orleans-area wage in the second quarter was down from $901 in the first quarter, when 511,661 people were employed, but up from $854 in the second quarter of 2010, when 512,324 people were employed. Read full article