In Episode 038 , Jack has invited Mr. Jim Mosquera, a Principal at Sentinel Consulting, a small business financing, and debt restructuring firm, and an author of three non-fiction books in the Escaping Oz series. According to Dun & Bradstreet's 2014 survey, in the next 60 minutes, 12 businesses will file for bankruptcy and another 317 will have suits, liens or judgments filed against them. Financial crises, whether they occur in an economy or within a business, occur slowly then suddenly. There are key decisions made within a business enterprise's lifecycle that will ultimately determine financial viability. Jim will share his experience from his business consulting journey in helping small to medium sized business, primarily in the US, and his three pillars at Sentinel Consulting in doing so, i.e. general business consulting work, alternative finance and debt restructuring.A Business Consultant Using Applied Mathematics to Solve Business ProblemsI always had a very strong interest in businesses and how businesses ran, did well in math in high school, so that made me a good candidate.  I guess to proceed through engineering school and that's why I pursued industrial engineering. Industrial engineering does a good job of bridging that gap between the hard engineering science and how businesses work. Of course, that's what engineers do. We solve problems. After I graduated from college, I went to work in the telecommunications field, which was interesting because I never really got to apply anything that I studied in my engineering program person per se, and I began working in telecommunications, was kind of at the forefront of a lot of the technological developments that you see today, what we call the Internet.  About four years ago, I started a consultancy called Sentinel Consulting, which has three main pillars to it. It has general business consulting, alternative finance, and debt restructuring and debt mediation.Three Pillars at Sentinel ConsultingThe first pillar is general business consulting. What I try to do is to identify things that may impair cashflow in an organization and sometimes it may be looking at financials, but again, since I have a technology background, I can look at things that are technologically oriented and point out perhaps deficiencies that then need to be followed up on maybe by some of my business partners.  The second pillar is alternative finance which means, at least in the US, the avenues for small to midsize business owners to pursue for capital acquisition that are outside of the traditional commercial banking system.  The third pillar really focuses on companies that are in trouble because of the debt problem.  And when they find themselves in trouble, they need to do some debt restructuring or in the case that they're facing civil litigation in the US because of the debt problem, they need some debt mediation because in the US that problems do not resolve themselves in course.Educating Clients by Writing Non-Fiction BooksThe non-fiction series is under the title of "Escaping Oz".  There are three books of escaping. The first one was written a little bit after the financial crisis in the US around 2010. And part of what I did there was to show the origins of our problems, why they really haven't been resolved.  Remember my background is in engineering. So if I see a problem I'm looking for its resolution when I see it from an economic perspective or financial perspective. And we really haven't resolved anything. We just kind of put a bandage over it for now. And yeah we've stopped the bleeding.  The third one is called escaping as an observer's reflections and it is organised like a regular book. But within each chapter, I made it a lot of series of very short articles.