MLOA Strives to Meet Members’ Needs with Seminars, Speaker

MLOA Executive Director Dr. Yvonne LaMar The Minority Limousine Operators of America (MLOA) has been busy these past few months, as it continues to offer training sessions to those seeking Small Business Administration (SBA) certification while also gearing up for its last in-person meeting of the year.

According to MLOA’s Executive Director Dr. Yvonne LaMar of LimousineQA.com, the association continues to see interest in both its social media marketing seminars and the call-in certification training sessions that she’s been running throughout the year for MLOA members. The current SBA certification program is in its second of three weeks and is taking seven members through the process—an intimate number that LaMar says is ideal for the “very time-consuming” scope of work and gathering of documents that precedes submitting a completed application.

“The goal is, that at the end of these sessions, we’ve reviewed the entire application and each member will be able to submit theirs with some confidence,” LaMar said.

While some members have previously submitted their applications, LaMar has not yet received feedback regarding their success achieving certification—though she isn’t surprised, seeing as “it takes about eight weeks for everything to turn around.” Along with “trying to fit one more certification session in before the Chauffeur Driven Show” and planning more social media marketing calls, LaMar is also working on a survey to find out what other programming association members want.

“The survey is to see if there are other things that members are interested in that just haven’t come up yet,” she said. “Instead of us presenting them with topics, it gives them a chance to tell us what they’d like to do, too. We have experts in the industry who are very willing to help us, and an advisory board and a board of directors who are very knowledgeable and can certainly provide a lot of training, too.”

MLOA is currently expanding its advisory board, which presently includes industry vendors such as Arthur Messina of Create-A-Card and Jeff Brodsly of Chosen Payments.

“We’re trying to reach across the industry to people who have different specialties, whether it’s insurance or sales or credit card processing,” LaMar said. “Right now, we have people like Art Messina and Jeff Brodsly, who are really just active and helpful people in general. It’s great having advisors on different aspects of the business because our members are mostly owners/operators, and it’s helpful to have vendors’ marketing knowledge or their financial knowledge.”

With a membership base stretching across the country, MLOA’s bimonthly meetings are typically conference calls, though its October 13 meeting will be held at the Chauffeur Driven Show in Miami Beach. LaMar said that the association is planning to have a guest speaker at the meeting “representing very large companies who have procurement offices and who will talk to our members about getting access to large contracts.”

MLOA’s next membership conference call is July 22.

Visit mlooa.org for more information.

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