WorldCity Business Magazine

X Years

by Ken Roberts

We were the first to tell you that Kraft Latin America was coming to town. And the first to tell you that AIG Latin America was coming to town.

And the first to tell you that Malaysia had chosen Miami as the location for only its third U.S. office, after New York and Los Angeles. We were the first to stand up for the international trade community when civic leaders briefly considered putting a baseball stadium near the Port of Miami several years ago. Theyre at it again.

As we begin our 10th year of publishing WorldCity Business, we remember that we have been a newspaper, a newsletter and a glossy magazine; that we have launched and killed an Air & Ocean Cargo Directory, a Partners special publication focusing on the Miami connections to first the United Kingdom and then Brazil, a Who’s Who directory of business leaders.; that we have started and continue a Who’s Here multinational database, a Connections event series, a CEO Roundtable event series and semi-annual poll, a Web site, World Trade Map posters, a TradeLinks event series, and Miami TradeNumbers, TradeAmericas to be rechristened Americas TradeNumbers this year and six other TradeNumbers publications across the country, from New York to Los Angeles.

We have misspelled Guatemala on the front cover ouch and confused Manny Mencia, the effusive head of international for Enterprise Florida with Manny Medina, the serial entrepreneur now running Terremark, the only private network access point in the United States. Ouch again.

We have accepted advertising from an Australian advertising agency working for a German company that owns a Brazilian shipping line that wanted to reach an international audience in South Florida. We have accepted advertising from local people who walked into our office with a check.

When I opened our doors, I did not know what a NVOCC was, nor a letter of credit, a TEU or, quite honestly, much about Latin America. We have learned and are learning. You can google any of those terms you dont know, something I couldnt do a decade ago.

Along the way, as our expertise has developed, we have been quoted in the New York Times, the Seattle Times, the New Orleans Times-Picayune, the Savannah Morning News, the Laredo Times, The Economist, the Miami Herald, the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel, the Daily Business Review, Reuters, forbes.com.

It hasn’t been all positive publicity. We have had our obituary or something closely akin, written, prematurely, by the Miami Herald and the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel, just after Sept. 11, 2001, as we scrambled to deal with a world without advertising, the worst advertising environment in 50 years. Those copies are yellowed now, but still close by.

And survive we have. It has not been easy. It still isn’t. I have poured everything I have into WorldCity, all the gains from my previous business and more. I have convinced a handful of investors of my vision and benefited from their great patience. Always reluctantly, I have relied on way too many credit card offers. I worked for free for the first four years and still almost always work at least six days a week. Today, as I start this, it is a Saturday.

And now we are beginning our 10th year and it feels good, damned good. And exciting. This, you see, is an amazing community. With so much going on. So much opportunity. And so many serious and sobering challenges.

To become a world city, there is still much work to be done. Other cities, other regions are investing at far greater levels, making broader plans, seeing a bigger future than we seem willing to dare to imagine here. We are lacking for big thinkers. We will pay the price.

A quick aside. I thought I had created the term world city when I took it as our name. It described what I saw happening here, maybe what I hoped would happen here, and it certainly went beyond Latin city, which in many ways it is and remains. I was pretty pleased with myself.

Not long after the first issue rolled off the press, I heard from Jan Nijman, a professor of Geography at the University of Miami. He was curious about this publication, then informed me that he, like other academicians, had studied world cities for decades. Not such an original idea after all. We valued his expertise then as now. He supplies a column for this anniversary edition.

Nijman studied, and studies, his home of Amsterdam as well as Mumbai and Miami. It turns out there is a hierarchy, with New York, London and Tokyo generally at the top, followed by a host of cities at the second level and a slew in the third tier. Miami generally, if you are curious, sits somewhere between the second and third tier.

I learned all this because, as Jan informed me, these professors and professorial types even had a web site, a curious new thing when few others did. In fact, to give you a sense of perspective, when we first created our business cards late in the 20th century, we debated whether we should include our e-mail addresses. Our concern: Would we receive unsolicited emails if we did?

Today, as we celebrate a decade of publishing, we do, in fact, receive e-mails that we did not solicit. Perhaps you do as well. But we also receive some truly terrific e-mails from all corners of the globe, people interested in our Who’s Here database, people interested in our trade statistics, organizations interested in having me come speak about the benefits of globalization to local communities, people wanting help finding a freight forwarder or wanting our perspective on something or another.

One recent e-mail came from a consulting firm working with UBS. The Swiss bank, it turns out, has chosen three cities around the world they want to study as change agents, global hubs, nexus points, cutting-edge cities. Those three cities are Singapore, Barcelona and Miami, and they wanted to talk to me about this place as a metaphor for how a global bank should be approaching the coming world.

People seek us out because we have found our niche, or niches. Or, more accurately, they found us. Two examples.

First, the Who’s Here multinational directory. In one of our early issues, back in the newspaper format, we asked the Beacon Council if we could run its multinational list in an upcoming issue. Our goal was to show what a world city it was. It was a couple of hundred companies that we organized by country, using little maps and flags to give it a little flair.

The phone rang off the hook. Where did you get this list? How do I get this list? And we knew we were on to something. So, with the backing of the Beacon Council, we began looking for more of these companies, more information on these companies, more information on you, what you do and how you do it.

It has led to not only our list of 1,200 companies but our event series Connections, which attracts 75 to 100 people once a month to hear about a topic of global import or perspective; and the CEO Roundtable, which brings together five heads of Latin America operations to discuss, without audience but for publication, what “keeps them awake at night.”

Second example. Not long after our founding, we discovered a treasure trove of import-export statistics, taught ourselves to slice and dice, and produced a map covering a two-page spread that showed South Florida’s Top 100 trade partners. It was an immediate hit because it showed graphically something no one had ever een before. Its popularity was such that it became a free-standing poster, a poster that found its ways to walls across South Florida.

Invariably, the question was this: “Why is Brazil No. 1?” Which led me to successful businessman and community booster, the late Jay Malina, and what is now known as the Jay Malina International Trade Consortium.

I wanted the Miami-Dade trade promotion authority to sponsor something that did not exist, a new publication called Miami TradeNumbers. We would provide information that had never been seen in such a public way before: the specific imports and exports of South Florida’s top trade partners. They could use it to sell South Florida to the world, and help the local community understand the impact of international trade on the economy.

They did, and they have been the prime sponsor for seven consecutive years. It became so popular that, the story goes, former Mayor Alex Penelas instructed his aides not to hand it out on trade missions until after he had finished speaking. Turns out, it was something of a distraction.

Over the years it has led to a number of interesting discoveries. Once, when handgun bans in U.S. cities was under discussion, we decided to look into handgun imports. South Florida, as it turns out, was ranked No. 2.

Another time, as a New Year was ready to dawn, we were looking for a story and decided to check on caviar imports. Turns out South Florida was once again the No. 2-ranked Customs district for imports of the delicacy. And, subsequently, we joked that Miami is a great place to party but be careful.

But I always knew that the word Miami could be replaced with Houston or New York or Los Angeles or Boston, always knew that other communities would benefit from knowing about the impact global trade was having on their local communities. So we launched TradeNumbers publications in New York and Los Angeles, Houston and Boston, for the state of Georgia and the United States as a whole.

And now we want to launch them on a country basis how South Korea trades with the United States, how Brazil does, how Mexico does, how China does.

It all started, WorldCity Business started, with the desire to fill a void, to provide information to the international business community in South Florida about Latin America and the global economy the issues that mattered to them.

All these years later, we reach out each month with this publication to those 1,200 multinationals, representing almost 60 of the worlds nations, all with offices in South Florida.

The multinationals here I should say the ones we have discovered, because there are certainly hundreds of others employ 125,000 people. What really shows the influence of these multinationals is another number we research: They oversee about 600,000 people here, in Latin America and the Caribbean, and around the world. You are influential, smart, well-educated, worldly and well-traveled. Our readers, we like to say, take a plane to work, not a car. We also like to tell people you are more likely to know the name of the president of Brazil than the junior senator from Florida.

We look forward to a great 10th year, learning more about you, sharing what we learn with you and doing an even better job in exploring how a local community interacts with the global economy. WC