Making Friends

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It’s not every day that a local business person gets to spend an hour with the president and the vice president in the White House, but that’s exactly what happened to Arnulfo “Arnold” Ventura.

“It was quite surreal,” said the 34-year-old Ventura, co-founder and chief executive of Coba, a Mexican beverage company in downtown L.A.’s historic core. “During the whole meeting, I was saying to myself, ‘I can’t believe I’m here inside the White House meeting with the president!’”

And it all happened quickly. During Thanksgiving weekend, Ventura received a call from the U.S. Small Business Administration, asking him to come out to Washington, D.C., to “talk with key decision makers” about what small-business owners wanted to see come out of the “fiscal cliff” negotiations.

The meeting with Ventura and 14 other small-business owners took place Nov. 27 in the Roosevelt Room.

“The president went around the room and asked each of us about our businesses; he was very cordial,” Ventura said.

After the formal meeting ended, he got 10 minutes of unexpected one-on-one face time with Vice President Joe Biden. They talked about the need to improve the nation’s university system so business owners could hire more skilled workers.

The next day, Ventura’s photo appeared in a Wall Street Journal article about the meeting.

“My parents rushed out to buy that issue. My father was almost at a loss for words,” he said.

Crime and Crime Again

It felt all too familiar for Richard Chemel. The vice president of Chatsworth’s JustDeals LLC, a daily deals site, found out during the Thanksgiving holiday that almost $40,000 of merchandise the company sells had been stolen from a delivery truck.

While robberies are an unfortunate – and not uncommon – circumstance for a business, Chemel knew the feeling on a personal level.

A few years ago, a burglar broke into his family’s house when they lived in Van Nuys. It was in the evening, and a young girl shattered a window and barged inside.

“She pushed our daughter onto the ground and had a foot on her back,” Chemel remembers. His wife quickly scared the intruder away and their daughter was thankfully unharmed.

“When somebody takes advantage of you, you feel violated no matter where you are.” Chemel said. “It’s a helpless feeling, but eventually you get over it and do your best to move on.”

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