TLE Center for Urban Entrepreneurship & LMI Textiles
Boston
LMI Textiles now has the capital structure in addition to a solid manufacturing, logistics, and distribution chain to do business with large scale companies globally.
This success story comes from Small Business Technical Assistance grantee, TLE Center for Urban Entrepreneurship (TLE). LMI Textiles is a minority-owned personal protective equipment (PPE) manufacturing firm founded by Legrand Lindor. The company has been in operation for over ten years serving clients locally and overseas. Over the past year, the company has been able to develop a solid value chain which has increased its overall manufacturing, logistics, and distribution capabilities to process large scale orders to hospitals and area municipalities to help it scale. The company is also now actively serving this sector as well as the small business space in light of the numerous small business enterprises needing PPE globally to conduct business in compliance with the current social distancing guidelines requirements in place due to the COVID pandemic.
Challenge
The company’s primary challenge outside of capital was to establish solid working relationships with the procurement teams at the larger institutions for large contracts and at a global level. This would enable the company to have the working capital it needed to do business on a large scale and also position the company for sustainable growth.
Solution
The scope of technical assistance provided was to help the business owner develop strategies to build the partnerships needed to establish a solid value chain and particularly as it relates to logistics and distribution. In addition to having the business owner participate in TLE's 2017 pre-accelerator program and other relevant training workshops to devise a solid work plan to accomplish this, we provided ongoing one-on-one technical assistance thereafter to support
the business owner where needed with executing the items on the business’s work plan to be implemented. This included pivoting the business on several occasions, and since COVID-19,developing seamless online ordering capabilities for small to mid-sized orders. As of July, the company’s website has been redesigned to support large accounts as well. The company also obtained its MBE certifications to be able to acquire contracts via state and federal contracting programs.
Impact
LMI Textiles now has the capital structure in addition to a solid manufacturing, logistics, and distribution chain to do business with large scale companies globally. Because of this, they are also able to provide mid-size to small size and even micro enterprises with orders to help them serve their customers as they look to rebuild post COVID.
TLE Center for Urban Entrepreneurship
