The Main St. America Build Back Better Small Business Success Program fixes the two major disconnects that many small businesses find when they are seeking assistance to create successful and sustainable business growth.
These disconnects have been made even more apparent by the Pandemic, and the resulting negative economic impact that Main St. America has suffered.
This negative impact has had a ripple effect throughout society, affecting employment and financial security. This has opened up the threat of devastation of towns and communities from coast-to-coast. A new term, “Pandemic Poverty,” illuminates the looming threat to American society.
The Stark Difference in the Pandemic Recovery of Corporate America vs. Main St. America Can be Seen in Towns Across the Country.
You don’t have to go any further than your local Downtown area to see the good and the bad of how things are going right now. In “Any City, USA,” the view is the same. Corporate interests are building beautiful hotels and buildings, but, just a short block over, small businesses are going out of business, and main street is suffering.
Business startups that once were full of hope are now losing that hope.
Our government is helping with recovery efforts through the assistance provided by the American Rescue Plan, but need is so great that the plan is out of money and has been unable to help millions of small businesses that are now struggling to reopen and survive without assistance. The desperation is real, and all too many businesses are completely throwing in the towel.
Lynn Sarkany has been a marketing/business consultant and College Professor in the area of Marketing for 30 years. Lynn has seen what works and what does not work to create economic development for small businesses.
The two major disconnects that she has seen in her tenure of working with small business are:
- Lack of access to capital. The most used phrase is: “If only the bank would give me a chance.”
- Lack of access to sound business advice and education. The most used phrases are: “I am good at what my business does, but I don’t know the workings of how to run my business. I need to put strategies into place now for my business while I learn why those strategies are necessary for the health and growth of my business.”
The Main St. America Build Back Better Small Business Success Program has been created to solve these disconnects by helping our program participants to get a hand up and not a handout.
Participants will be carefully chosen from an assessment of their overall business concept viability, and their commitment to doing the hard work necessary to make their business thrive and grow. Our program will give business owner participants access to $30,000.00-$60,000.00 in the form of a low-interest loan that they will pay back in 72 Months.
This loan money will be managed by a Project Manager who will oversee the efforts of a Cohort of Consulting Managers with expertise in Human Resources, Accounting and Finance, Operations, Legal, and Marketing to fit the specific needs of the business. The business will also have funds available to make Capital Investment in the business that is substantiated by the recommendations of the Cohort of Consulting Managers. The Cohort of Consulting Managers will work intensively with the Business Owner Participant for a period of two years. The objectives of this work will be to:
- Create successful and sustainable business strategies for the business.
- Explain this strategy thoroughly to the Business Owner Participant so that they gain a more thorough understanding of how to manage “The business side” of their business.
The responsibility for loan payback will deepen the commitment of the Business Owner to actively participate in the program, with the added benefit of creating a payback track record that will create a history of credit-worthiness for the business owner. The loan payback history will be reported to all 3 credit reporting agencies, and will therefore create “bankable” business owners that will then be ready to participate in conventional banking and SBA loan programs.
