Small Business Recovery, Looking Forward - Hosted by Investors Bank

tonight's show is sponsored by investors bank as we talk to key thought leaders across new jersey in new york in the chamber of commerce and cdfi space my job at the investors bank is to run their business and government banking space and before i kick off i want to thank a few folks for allowing me to be here tonight my first thanks of course is to yitzhak sophos who's observing passover tonight i am his twice a year host for yom kippur and passover and again it is my pleasure to be here it is my palm sunday as i told you yesterday i hope to see him after easter and once pesach is concluded and so again my thanks to to yitzhak my thanks also to shirley and mikhail for helping us to put together a great show for you tonight on the investors side kari panchek and jason bacara who have been priceless in helping me to be a great host for you this evening we have great content to share that is actionable and will give you an opportunity to help sustain and grow your business [Music] my first guest tonight is going to be john harmon ceo and president of the african-american chamber of commerce let me give you a little bit of information about john john has served as the founder president and ceo of the african-american chamber of commerce of new jersey since 2007. in this role he has a responsibility of establishing implementing and executing the mission as well as a fiduciary oversight and governance of the chamber in accordance with his bylaws in addition he works to identify strategic partnerships in both the public and private sector to connect aacc nj members and support to resources and opportunities to grow and sustain their goals and objectives and their businesses in new jersey mr harmon serves as an advocate on behalf of the 1.1 million african-american residents and over 70 000 black owned businesses statewide to ensure that policy at the municipal county federal and state level provides fairness equity and access to a level playing field in the marketplace mr harmon is also the former president and ceo of the metropolitan trenton african american chamber of commerce he's also a banker which is why i like him so john i want to welcome you to the show uh thanks for being here this is your first time in the show and hopefully it's the first of many times so thanks for being here john well mike thank you for this opportunity pretty excited to have a this conversation with you and your your listening audience today you know john tonight we've been talking to presidents of chambers of commerce in both new jersey and new york and i'm really excited to be talking to you because you know this is our first time to connect and candidly you know the population of business owners that you represent have been underserved for for quite some time and so i'm really looking forward to your to your insights and your thoughts and and really your forecasts of how we're going to recover from from this pandemic let's start off with the following high level how is a business climate and environment in new jersey right now recovering from the pandemic well the state overall is i think they're doing as best they can given um the current environment governor murphy and his team have been working hard to put resources i think it was a couple weeks ago he announced about a 300 million dollar package that would consist of grants and um and very very favorable loans the terms are structured in such a way that would give small businesses an opportunity to ramp up and before they have to make payments so that's that's encouraging and just the eda that's our new jersey economic development authority um providing also technical assistance resources for small businesses and nonprofits you know but for government right now uh many businesses would be in pretty bad shape so the help from both the state and the federal levels have been very encouraging so um i guess we're doing as best we can given the current environment you know john you you've been in the role you served now for for more than a decade um tell me more about the african-american chamber of commerce what's your mission what keeps you up at night how do how do you run the show well it's a great question you know this june will make uh 24 years i was privileged to be president of a regional chamber for about 10 years and and that's where i really became a student and really understanding what mainstream business was all about and connecting uh fortunate relationship with the u.s chamber of commerce the national black chamber and chambers here in the state of new jersey we're really to coalesce around a game plan to bring black business into the economic mainstream in essence get them to understand free enterprise and capitalism and all the components that they have to foster relationships with and leverage to run a successful business enterprise and so in some that's what the mission is all about really promoting and educating in part our mission is about educating a sector of society that has a lot to offer but oftentimes is not in a position to have their value proposition properly leveraged so that's a role we play the four areas that we focus on mike is you know education as i said health job readiness and business and and you know health the underlying health conditions of the black community has been really decimated or exposed as a result of this cope at 19. you're listening to another great episode of mind your business on 710 wor hosted this evening by investors bank my name is mike mcintyre and i head the business bank here um you know john the the congress just passed uh the american rescue plan act uh last week for 1.9 trillion dollars there are massive allocations of funding and liquidity across various sectors of the economy how will those funds flow into new jersey that's a great question and and the term masses with a big t as well so the governor those monies will come down through the state and and i'm saying hopefully and i know the governor has made some great overtures about how these resources will be dispensed throughout all sectors of society and you know his um his is uh i guess his theme or agenda is uh a stronger fairer stronger economy so here today i think they've been working to achieve that um but i i think to your point it has to be very intentional go to those sectors of society that have been been really uh adversely impacted as a result of the covet 19. so we're hearing a lot about giving more attention to the business community and those underserved sectors of society in terms of housing resources health resources and small business resources that is our hope that's what we're hearing and is i hope that they would execute and distribute those dollars uh very uh intentionally to to impact those areas that been severely impacted by this um pandemic yeah you know john it's it's been a year essentially right since the pandemic started and uh you know aside from you know sba disaster loans uh and ppp that that's been my primary focus the last year you know on the business side of what i do during the day do you still see uh businesses that aren't taking full advantage of the available services and options available to them at the state and local level in new jersey well i mean that's part of what we do to try to make sure individuals are aware as you know the first round of ppp came out of the gate and many folks particularly black and brown businesses were not really engaged to take full advantage of that but as we got into the second round working with new jersey bankers association and working with our great partners at investors bank and others we were able to really make a a an impactful difference and so this third round we're not seeing as much of businesses reaching out and taking advantage of these resources and i think many of them are not sure if they're eligible because of some of the requirements so we're working as hard as we can to let them know that hey it's one quarter if you had one quarter where you had it a dip of about 25 or so you should respond and raise your hand and get and take advantage of this great opportunity i'm hopeful that um that you know the government will probably do a forgiveness uh my hope is maybe 250 000 or less they should just forgive it and without having a lot of questions that's what i'm hoping will occur but that's john harmon speaking well there there is some debate happening down in dc on on that topic uh and many others you know what we keep hearing is that uh ppp may be extended beyond the the march 31st deadline you know out to the end of may and uh so question for you on that regard from from a ppp perspective has the program worked um in my estimation it has worked i mean for those who have taken advantage of the resources our chamber was a recipient in the first round we applied for the second round and investors handled those both those transactions for us it was a difference maker we have a staff of 11 people we're able to keep all them working without furloughing or letting anybody go so i would say it was a difference maker i know for our organization and many folks that took advantage of it that we've been in contact with will say the same you're listening to another great episode of mind your business on 710 wor hosted this evening by investors bank my name is mike mcintyre and we're talking to john harmon president and ceo of the african-american chamber of commerce uh john you recently received a million dollar grant uh from the pascal sykes foundation uh tell me about it you know that that this was um uh this is another game changer if you will we have this relationship with the jersey community capital which is a rather large i would say cdfi in new jersey and we've been in talks with them and working with them for some time now and what we would deem a crawl walk run strategy we're hoping to stand up our own cdfi with the chamber so that we could to make micro loans to small businesses so in part we are providing technical assistance and loan processing and njcc is or is making loans the pascal sykes foundation put a million dollars in the pot to fund loans and also to under support the under the infrastructure of our um technical assistance which is very uh is going to be as i said a game changer but i want to take a step a little step further here in terms of i think you asked me a question earlier and i want to kind of go back to it and just talk more about the corporate support the corporate response the response from the financial services institutions in addition to the paseo sykes foundation helping me in the chamber address many of the disparities in the adverse implications for black businesses as a result of this pandemic we've seen corporations join the chamber fund initiatives that will help in terms of programming educational programming for high school students workforce ex-offender training and entrepreneurship helping them start and sustain small businesses job readiness and placement opportunities this is all coming from resources from corporations in new jersey in addition working with new jersey bankers association we now have 20 financial services institutions that are part of the chamber that are making capital access to capital more readily available so this pandemic although it's been um has some adverse implications as it relates to health and treasure there's been a civil lining in terms of bringing people together being more receptive to diversity equity and inclusion as a a transformer as a as a prep a pathway if you will to make new jersey's economy more competitive so um the pascal sykes foundation was just one of many partners that we've been able to leverage that i think down the road will pay big dividends for black businesses black people in new jersey as a whole and improve the overall competitiveness of the state so john let me let me build on that you made you made some forward-looking statements and this is really the next part of that question you know as you look out over the next 12 to 18 months you know in in your view what needs to happen to help the existing businesses survive and what has to happen to have new businesses thrive well i i think we what has to happen is we must continue the same the public sector government must be conscious of the fact that you know small businesses fuel the economy and and finding a way to connect them to their supply chain as well and if there was any area of deficiency is public contracting i think we have some real problems in new jersey around public contracting unions have preferences in new jersey and there's very little incentive in public contracting for minority and women-owned businesses so that's one area that we must do a better job but the engagement of the corporations in in the banks i can't underscore how significant that is if we continue to build on it getting individuals to acknowledge that we are all in this together and not look at this as charity this is about business this is about driving the economy in an equitable way where all sectors of society are at the trough in in getting some meaningful uh reciprocity and thus using that reciprocity to fund their households and also to fund their business plans so i think we're on to something here as more people look at equity uh i'm sorry diversity equity and inclusion as as a paradigm for the betterment of society and not charity or or helping you know uh just you know um helping folks that that are down on their luck now this is this is about a coexistence in the mutual way mutually beneficial way my guest tonight has been john harmon president and ceo of the african-american chamber of commerce of new jersey john as we close how can folks learn more about your chamber how can they how can they become a member thank you so much for that again michael i can't emphasize enough how much i appreciate being here but they can go to aaccnj.com there you'll find out about our weekly radio show the empowerment hour airs every monday and also our television television show that airs on pbs njtv once a month called pathway to success my guest tonight john harmon president and ceo of the african-american chamber of commerce of new jersey my next guest this evening uh is is a local friend and local neighbor here in brooklyn randy pierce president and ceo of the brooklyn chamber of commerce randy welcome michael thank you again for having me so randy last time i talked to you it was six months ago it feels like ages because again you know in the years of covet it has been ages um i know you guys have recently issued a year-end survey tell us about it yeah we had been surveying uh the small businesses uh since the shutdown back in march we were doing monthly surveys but we did a comprehensive year-end that looked at really the impact on the businesses uh from 2019 through 2020. uh it's a it's a pretty challenging picture especially for the small business community eighty percent of our businesses indicated uh year over year declines in revenue of the 80 percent that saw a decline half of them uh indicate that they've lost more than half of their annual revenue so that's a significant number um you know the other thing that we're seeing is that 85 percent of the small businesses let go some of their employees 33 or a third of businesses still owe back rent now that number's come down a little bit so we've been tracking that number since the beginning and it makes a little bit of sense because as businesses were able to open up and generate some some some revenue they've tried to make good on some of their uh you know their old rant um but only half of them have received any type of concession so you know we still have a big issue with rent it's the highest fixed cost for any small business uh we're gonna have to figure out how we're gonna reconcile this uh once we lift uh the moratorium on addictions another interesting data point 51 of the businesses have taken on more debt uh just to get them through this crisis just to get them through this pandemic so um you know it's a pretty challenging picture for the small business community and by the way this is these are the businesses that are still in business and can answer a survey it doesn't it doesn't speak to uh the countless number of businesses that have permanently closed and and it's hard to get a an accurate number on that but we're estimating depending upon the commercial corridor or community uh between twenty percent and thirty three percent of businesses uh have permanently closed you know when we last spoke uh like i said it's been it's been six months ago you outlined how much work the chamber has been doing day in and day out to help your members and really to help the overall community in brooklyn you know how is that mission continuing on now six months later yeah over the last 12 months it's become our singular focus i mean business recovery is a yeah that's who we are that's what we're doing by the way it's not about membership in any way shape or form uh all of the services and programs that we offer to get help businesses get back on their feet are open to any business uh throughout brooklyn uh but the numbers uh they tell a story uh michael you know and and the numbers are pretty extraordinary from our perspective you know we've done 31 uh formal commercial uh corridor visits these are listening tours these are me personally getting out talking to the small businesses and getting a better understanding of what's happening on the ground you know we launched our bring back brooklyn fund a crowdfunding campaign through our cdfi in order to raise some money for no interest no fee loans we did we raised 750 000 we gave out um 137 thousand dollars in loans and 500 000 in grants we did deep cleanings for businesses we use the grant money to pay for deep cleaning so businesses that were reopening and restarting we were able to tap into other small businesses to come in uh and help sanitize the facility and get it baseline clean and safe for opening we delivered almost a half a million units of ppe valued at almost 140 000 so these are masks these are gloves this is sanitizers these are face shields these are the thermometers um more recently we pre-purchased 200 heaters just for restaurants 100 propane and 100 electric valued at uh 62 000. um you know we we're doing a lot to sort of get the message out in the press we had a lot of press mentions last year um and most significantly we've served a total of um uh almost 3 800 small businesses across the borough so we are very very proud of the story that these numbers tell because these are real businesses real people uh real people's lives uh that we've helped help to impact in a positive way it's extraordinary it's extraordinary work randy um question for you about the the american rescue plan act now that uh arp as it's known uh officially now that that's been passed by by the congress and funds are being distributed to both individuals and and to states i noticed that there are uh allocations of funding for restaurants and hospitality etc how do you think and how will those funds flow into brooklyn over the weeks and months ahead first of all this plan um is a very good plan for new york and it's a very good plan for small businesses and you know credit goes to senate majority leader chuck schumer right person at the right time for new york for sure to take on that role you know we've been fighting for a carve out for restaurants since the beginning since the first stimulus package last year my good friend andrew ridgie of the new york city hospitality alliance he's been leading that fight we've been supporting him uh you know the airline's got to carve out um you know and other industries have restaurant hospitality industries super important new york and uh they've been hit the hardest so we were we were pleased to see uh the carve out included you know these are grants not loans right so that's the other important factor here these are these are grant support the restaurants won't have to pay it back uh or they won't have to ask for forgiveness through a formula and they could use it to really get back on their feet save our stages it's going to help us get another another grant program is going to help us get broadway and live entertainment venues back online you know these things are really really important as we move forward of course the the the allocations to the states and the localities were something uh that we in new york needed desperately especially with the looming budget deficits um so all of it coming together in this package is really a good package uh for small businesses for new york you know by the way uh the previous package which was passed in january that had a second draw of the ppp loans which is equally as important right so even if you got a paycheck protection program loan last year you could qualify for a second draw uh you know all of this combined uh really shows that you know the federal government when it steps up uh can do what it needs to do to support the american people and to support more importantly small businesses you listen to another great episode of mind your business hosted this evening by mike mcintyre of investors bank uh randy as we close this this conversation and again you know looking back over the last six months i think you know i were talking offline about how vaccinations are really trying to have a positive impact on on the recovery here in new york and across the country how can individuals and businesses learn more about the brooklyn chamber of commerce um brooklyn brooklynchamber.com uh is our website we have a coven 19 business resources page pops up right on the top when you get to the home page we also are part of what's called the new york city small business resource network it's a public private partnership us in the five chambers of commerce as well as the partnership for new york city new york city edc and funded by the peterson foundation it allows us to put feet on the street boots on the ground we deploy recovery specialists to all the communities all the neighborhoods throughout brooklyn there are six here in brooklyn 22 city-wide uh basically if you go to smallbusinessresourcenetwork.org that's the website uh simple intake form uh you'll be assigned a business recovery specialist connects you to access to financing marketing support technology support including e-commerce and website design pro bono legal services all of it is free all of it is designed to get businesses back on their feet so just go to smallbusinessresourcenetwork.org or call the brooklyn chamber of commerce at 718-875-1000 and we'll be able to connect you to that network we'll deploy a recovery specialist right to your door and we'll help you to access the support that's available my guest this evening has been randy pierce president and ceo of the brooklyn chamber of commerce randy great to connect it's been extraordinary the progress that the chamber has made in contributing to the recovery of brooklyn and beyond and again thanks for what you do and have a great evening thank you so much appreciate being here tonight a guest episode of mind your business presented this evening by investors bank my name is mike mcintyre and i run the business bank over at investors based in short hills new jersey my next guest this evening is tom gretch president and ceo of the queen's chamber of commerce uh and as a queen's resident tom it's my pleasure to welcome you to our show and thanks for being here mike thanks the pleasure is all mine i really appreciate the invitation tom we've been through uh an extraordinary year as we've been talking to other leaders of chambers and cdfis tonight um you know my first question it remains the same describe the business climate in queens right now so so right now we're cautiously optimistic about about a pretty robust uh late spring and early summer i was in manhattan a few weeks ago with one of your previous guests who's become a good friend randy pierce from brooklyn chamber of commerce uh also andrew ridgey from the new york city hospitality alliance and our friend vijay dadapani from the hotel trades group in manhattan and this is probably like two weeks ago and except for 50 cops on on the job in times square it was pretty desolate in in times square uh it took me just a few minutes to get from queens to manhattan um the office market there is an ongoing challenge getting the office workers back but i will tell you that in queens it's not nearly normal but but people are out and about the streets are getting a little bit more crowded uh the sidewalks the vendors are out the storefronts are open where stores are still open and uh like i said i'm pretty cautiously optimistic things are getting better you know last week the congress passed the american rescue plan and i understand that you recently had an opportunity to speak with the majority leader uh chuck schumer just before his passage um what have you learned what did he convey to you in your membership well first of all it was it was a great event we've been trying to work with uh senator schumer on an in-person way for a while he's always been very receptive to some of the business things going on but it was great to get him and uh as luck would have it we scheduled him for the friday before last at five o'clock which is kind of an odd time right but listen you get schumer when you can get him right so we had the event we started off and it was kind of dramatic because they actually were going through the vote and organizing the votes that very hour we had them from like uh five to almost quarter to six and the top of it he was a gentleman and said folks i'm i'm i'll be fielding some phone calls please no disrespect and i kind of commented about hey listen you're doing the people's work thank you right and so a couple times the phone rang and it was some of his colleagues but uh it was a great experience to have them on we thanked them profusely for his support of the legislation and uh got some great questions from uh the folks that tuned in that day it was a great opportunity you're listening to another great episode of mind your business presented this evening by investors bank by your host mike mcintyre uh tom you know now that the act is passed you know you're you're you have the finger on the pulse of queens how do you expect the funds to flow from the federal government to the state and then ultimately into the borough so i think that'll probably go through the same uh machinations as previous the small business the united states small business administration the sba as well as some of the uh the banks such as yours that that service the local population and i will make a comment i'm a big believer in the glass is half full not half empty and i'm not a basher of organizations especially during tough times but i will tell you that during 2020 lots of folks happily and sadly jumped on the bashing of the sba bandwagon and i can tell you that in the first couple of weeks of those programs they processed more applications in the first 14 days than they had processed in the previous 14 years it's important for queens people new yorkers and americans to know that was a drinking from a fire hose from day one i will tell you we've had we've had a number of folks from the sba the regional district manager on uh that runs basically most of the east coast they have done a fantastic job of reacting to that situation from april of last year and i think you're going to see a major major improvement from then till now it's been incrementally better as time's gone by but i think the sba is more than ready for um the deluge it's going to be happening again so tom you know built building on ppp and i'm glad you brought that up uh as as of now the program is due to expire uh at the end of the month however there is debate down in washington about extending it beyond uh may 31st uh you know from your view have your members have have local businesses in queens be able to access the ppp programs efficiently they have been and i will tell you um you know in many respects my hat is off and kudos to the federal government you're not going to hear a lot from a lot of people right but but you know just yesterday announced they're going to push back the april 15th tax deadline it's nice to have cut some kind of a sense of reality out there um i got to imagine if you're a tax preparer and we have a lot of them that are members of the chamber including on my board uh patrick ew our our treasurer is a partner at baker tilly 2020 will probably go down in the history books as one of the more complicated if not the most complicated tax year out there whether they were a big drop in revenue uh aid that folks got losses that people incurred so uh when it comes to the to the aid i think that the feds are gonna be relatively uh flexible with allowing some leeway with some of these programs and some of these terms in a similar fashion to what they did with the irs tax deadline we're speaking with tom gretch president and ceo of the queen's chamber of commerce uh tom you touched on the uh some of the acts passed by congress in the last couple of weeks and you know one of the things about queens is that it's known for its great restaurants and you know one of the things that the arpa contains in the in the act is some some carve out of dollars for restaurants and hospitality businesses how are restaurants going to be able to access these funds so that's a really good question i want to touch base on a related somewhat tangential but related topic we advocated like crazy and i mean crazy on a daily basis calls letters email we actually were able to get uh grace mang a steam congresswoman from queens from queens county uh and a high ranking official in the uh in the democratic party um in congress to partner with peter king maybe an ideological opposite to come together in a nonpartisan way to help get that act passed to help along the way for the restaurants act we had a number of joint press conferences both in manhattan and also in queens at bourbon street on bayside up on the rooftop imploring their peers in congress to get it done and now that it is done we intend to be out there to help get that money paid out as quickly and as fast as possible you know restaurants are an interesting bunch right um they don't complain a lot they're very very hard workers but without any way forward without business i just mean basic business it was a really really tough year it's really tough in many places based upon the kind of food to do take out just a really really tough environment and the city of new york made it even more difficult in some cases with d-o-b d-o-t fdny the alphabet city of enforcement uh not to mention the sla from the state level beating up our restaurants pretty well uh in the spirit of of following rules and regulations so so we were at the forefront of trying to help our restaurants and uh we see a little bit of a bounce back however of the six thousand in queens we know that at least a thousand have closed i hope not permanently but one thousand of our six are closed and again we're hoping not for forever you know tom queens is known for its diversity in both uh languages population uh restaurants types of industries uh we were talking before about a really cool initiative that you launched on the tech side tell us about your tech council yeah we are we are very different we are probably the most diverse place on earth of the 3 000 or so counties in america queens is the most diverse by far i'm proud to tell you at the greens chamber we speak about 12 different languages so we might answer the phone good morning queen's chamber of commerce but if you've got a question you've got a challenge a different language uh we can assist um the queen's tech council you know the loss of amazon has stuck in my mind as uh on a professional level maybe the saddest day of my professional career when they pulled out that day they were beat up in city council by some very unprofessional folks they were chased out of town um all because of some misinformation that was put out there but let's not rehash the past let's talk about the future all the reasons that amazon chose queens in the first place existed then in a great way and are even more important today they chose queens for three basic important reasons our diversity which we just touched upon our educational system our eight colleges and universities in queens county educate over 90 000 students almost 48 percent are far and bored in fact queens college on casino boulevard graduates more computer science majors than any other college in the five boroughs we talked a lot about the fact that the real freedom train for lots of the kids to go to queens college would have been from casino boulevard to the annabelle basin right then the third most important part of why they chose us was our internal our infrastructure when it comes to transportation trains planes and automobiles and then some right and now you add bikes to the mix we have a great great transportation network we want to harness all that and we want to make sure that other tech companies and investors know what a great place queens is for example we've got amazon back to the table to help us out spearhead this organ this effort to bring tech here uh uh besides amazon we've got facebook we've got google we've got the cornell tech center right on roosevelt island when those companies grow and start prospering those startups we want them to look east the queens as they grow and prosper we're also forming a queen's angels group there's a lot of people men and women that that um learn their trade learn their craft here in queens we want to tap into them in a for-profit kind of a way build together a pool of funds to invest in those startups that we have you're listening to another great episode of mind your business presented this evening by investors bank my guest this evening is tom gretch president and ceo of the queen's chamber of commerce tom as as we look ahead and we start to vaccinate a greater share of our populations across the county you know what's your forecast for queens over the next 12 to 18 months that's a really good question and a tough one to predict right we don't have a crystal ball but i will tell you i'm a big believer in the man and woman on the street perspective when i walk around queens and i talk to people how's it going um my staff sometimes thinks i'm nuts right but when i'm out and about i look at the restaurants i look at the i look at i look at the different tenor of the streets but you know what i look for the food service delivery guys and gals those with trucks that deliver products to delis bodegas and restaurants i stop those truck drivers and i ask them how's business how's deliveries and if the guy tells me holy cow i'm swamped i'm delivering bologna here and egg and milk over there and so that's my barometer right when i see those people busy in swamp there was a period of time over last spring and summer i never saw those delivery trucks at all ever there was no demand so now i see them the other part that i love uh mike is seeing the airplanes to me i miss the airplane traffic i love airplane traffic because to me every one of those planes if you think about it represents a couple thousand jobs baggage handlers flight crew people that support getting the guy to the airport the gal driving the person serving them food whatever it happens to be we see that so my prediction is going to be at the end of the first half of the year after june 1st i look for a hockey stick not only across queens but across our state and across our country because of the pent-up demand the herd mentality has taken effect my staff got vaccinated a lot of folks i know got vaccinated thank heavens for the collaboration between people like merck and jay and jay and the efforts of the government to get get the vaccines out i am very very bullish on our economy across the country but especially in queens county wow tom gretch president and ceo of the queen's chamber of commerce thomas as we close this is i think probably the most important question that i'm going to have for you how can folks learn more about the queen's chamber and become a member that's a great that's a really good question and i truly appreciate it so when the pandemic first hit we um i made a decision about the blessing of my board that we were going to serve all comers you know we're a membership organization at the low level it's 370 a year to join the chamber of commerce it's about a dollar a day but i made a decision early on that we were going to serve anybody that called us for help right and i figured we'd do the membership thing at a later date because because heaven know we had we had grown men and women calling and crying to us literally in tears begging for help and we did that and so you want to join the queen's chamber of commerce we would be grateful and we would appreciate since 1911 we're now in our 110th year we've educated we've advocated and we've networked um our chamber address is queenschamber.org people want to reach me directly with questions and comments happy to have field all questions i take personal pleasure in answering any and all emails that come my way and that's teas and tom gretch g-r-e-c-h at queenschamber.org wow what what a great segment on mind your business hosted tonight by investors bank you're hearing and listening to tom gretch president and ceo of the queen's chamber of commerce tom thanks for joining us this evening and have a great week ahead michael thanks so much to you and your team it's a great organization investors bank i've had the pleasure of meeting your leadership uh dominic and kevin and the folks that serve on my board from investors my hat frankly is off to you so thank you for your service to our small business community thanks tom tonight's show is a takeover sponsored by investors bank member fdic a little bit about investors bank we are a 27 billion dollar institution based in short hills new jersey serving businesses and consumers across our 150 branch network in new jersey new york and long island my name is mike mcintyre and i run the business bank over at investors based in short hills new jersey my next guest this evening is a friend whom i hadn't talked to for for several years until i was sitting at home in new york uh reading cranes back in january and i read that paul was doing great work making ppp loans but he needed more money uh we took care of that a few weeks back and and here we are uh paul quintero ceo chief executive officer of ascendis inc uh paul joined ascendus back in 2007 as its cfo and was later named ceo in in 2011 under paul's leadership he has worked to improve the organization so they can fulfill its vision and mission of creating financial ascension for all my guest tonight paul ascendis welcome to the show paul thanks for being here thank you mike thank you for having me so paul we've been talking to to to ceos of of chambers of commerce tonight but but you're in a unique position in that you're a cdfi explain what that means explain what your mission is what ascendance does sure let me take it in part so who's ascendant were we were formerly called actions but we are national non-profit business lender uh and our mission very succinctly is to empower low to moderate income business owners with access to capital and business support but more generally we support all business owners who aren't quite ready you know for traditional bank lending now for three decades uh we've been fulfilling big dreams through small loans and when i say small we started in brooklyn uh i'm talking and just for the listeners who might be sitting there thinking wait this is new york 500 come on what are you going to do with 500 so let me just briefly tell you how we began uh it was it was a recession year uh a woman named uvalda alvarado with her husband had been working at the factories in brooklyn when we were doing a lot more manufacturing um lost her job and knocking on doors was uh rejected and no no we don't have any employment but found a metal food truck or a car excuse me in the junkyard in brooklyn and asked the owner can i rent that food cart and he said for what he said well i can't work in the factories but i know a lot of people that work in the factories that are from mexico and i like to make lunch and after he you know stopped laughing he said what mexican food you know this is 1991 this is before chipotle this is before i mean there wasn't even the starbucks in new york so um i said no no no there's going to fail don't worry about it 50 a month so she she convinced them to rent it for fifty dollars a month and in the fourth month this owner said listen uh i'm not a rental business i'm a junkyard buy this metal cart or forget about this uh idea of mexican food in brooklyn so she negotiated a rock bottom price of five hundred dollars but because everything was hand to mouth she didn't have five hundred dollars and so uh dejected someone said hey you should talk to ascendants and we were just beginning our mission work uh in brooklyn at that time and our very first loan in this country was to uvalda who took that money called it antojitos mexicano which means mexican appetizers with that money got a second cart eventually got a restaurant made two restaurants when we tracked her down 20 years later in 2011 she had moved from new york sold the business started the business again in texas when we knew her years ago she had one child at that time was three two of them went to college paid for by mom one of what's going to be paid for by mom and all because of a crazy dream of mexican food 500 over the span of 20 years made that kind of impact and i think for anyone listening to from new york you know what i'm talking about when i'm talking about neighborhoods and what local eateries and places can mean so uh that's what we've been doing but i'd say uh to just close this first part uh what makes us different i say are two things our purpose and our beliefs in terms of purpose we are a non-profit and why that's important if you're a small business owner is that we weren't created to merely transact with you we were created to help transform you and your life through entrepreneurship and i think that's important that's why we get up every day and the second is our beliefs and uh there are three of them you know the power of up knowing that this business is not just about making money but improving your life your family's life and your community the power of you uh because the entrepreneurs are why we have a mission so we get up every day to support them and then we know that the good that they'll accomplish will be great so so that's about ascendance and you asked about community development financial institution or cbfis what is that well that is technical speak that the u.s treasury gave to organizations that annually certify annually we have to prove annually certified that we're providing responsible affordable lending to low-income low wealth or other disadvantaged communities so since 1991 we've helped over 23 000 entrepreneurs 200 million in capital just since uh uh i guess covet started we've deployed 20 million in loans and over 30 million in grants so we can talk more about that but but cdfi's um uh you know we have a the housekeeping seal of approval from the us department of treasury we focus on this we prove it and we've been doing it for many years so paul you're a cdfi which means just for the audience's benefit that you actually make loans in addition to traditional bank financing correct explain explain some of the loans that you would make that perhaps a london like myself wouldn't or might refer to you instead sure uh so first of all we are a lender but we don't take deposit so we're not depository so please uh uh we we're working very close partners with our banks we want you to get to the bank so that's the first thing um but the second thing what do we do so uh i'll give you many examples uh number one uh years in business many folks start a hobby and it takes off after a few months and they want to make it run well that's not long enough because most most traditional lenders require tax returns of a year or two usually two to show trajectories so anyone that's less than two years in business that would be one example number two credit uh you normally need really good credit and for many folks either you don't have it because you weren't born in the us you happen to have a good business but you don't have credit history or you have been in the u.s but your credit history is not so good because no one had really worked with you to help improve it that can be a limitation three often times one of the season lending is collateral well in new york we don't really take collateral for us but the bank would need to because you know they don't want to take they we don't want banks taking risks that are uh uh inappropriate but for many of those that we serve there's no collateral if they had the collateral they probably wouldn't come to so i'd say collateral credit um stage of business and sometimes industry right now we know restaurants are really hard hit and we have always served the food and beverage industry but i can tell you that some of those industries are not um lender friendly uh because they do represent a lot of risk so those would be examples of uh businesses uh either by stage by credit by by collateral that just would not be a good fit for a bank even though there's a banking relationship in other ways and one that we want to foster and continue to grow we're speaking with paul quintero ceo of ascendus a new york-based cdfi uh paul you know the congress last week and and the president signed into law the american rescue plan uh over a trillion 1.9 trillion dollars of funding across the country from from your view from from the communities that you serve how do you see those funds filtering their way through the various federal and state local agencies ultimately to benefit you know your customers and your members so you know and here's how i see it i just speak too much for myself we serve the base of the pyramid so you know when you look at an iceberg what you see above the water if you would look at businesses are the businesses that have employees so at the 30 million business in the united states uh probably something in the order of uh 15 of those have employees let's say 20 to be very conservative so it's only 6 million businesses that have employees and what about the other 24 million the other 24 million no one talks about they're they're the lyft driver they're the the person doing you know as i said maybe home-based uh where they don't have a lot of employees or they're they're cooking things that's the shingle it's not even a mom and a pop it's a mom or a pup okay that's most of the business so the reason that i'm uh encouraged about what's happened is that this is the first stimulus that i've seen that wasn't top down but bottom up look whether people need it or not whether some people on the margin that's a debate but i know that at the bottom everybody needs this money because they're making up for the losses that were already incurred for example on average the loan demand that we see today for programs that we're involved in is twice as high as precoc and is it because your business took off all of a sudden when everything shut down clearly not people are making up for all the funds that they lost so the fact that the monies are going out to people the fact that there are uh supports here's what it's going to do and we serve the small the media or the low to medium community it's going to provide money for things that would otherwise have siphoned cash from the business it's peter pays paul right family need business need and they're always mixed so when you get when you get more support on the family side that could have been rent that could have been food that could have been some uh bill that would otherwise have drained from the business and so what it does is it will give i think uh businesses a little bit more of a fighting chance remember in the united states on average uh u.s small businesses have only about 20 to 23 days of cash on hand so this money will get used in a way that will help them be more resilient so i'm very optimistic but i can't you know until this all flows through i won't be able to make a more specific comment other than this is the first time that that what was under the iceberg it gets addressed and and has never been done in my in my career my history so i'm very encouraged by it um i think it will bode well for the majority of small businesses that no one talks about so paul you know building on that point you know we basically have two questions left here uh this has been a great segment so thank you so much you know you and i connected because you were quoted in in a publication talking about uh the ppp loans and and and really your challenges in making ppp loans i think people don't realize that sometimes cdfis can indeed make ppp loans but you're really at the mercy of how much liquidity you have to to make to make those loans what has been i think i know the answer but what continues to be your biggest challenge in making ppp loans to customers that you clearly know much better than we do well you you hit the first one which is capital we had come off a banner year in and unless you lend the money first because the sba is providing a guarantee but they're not providing the money uh well we didn't have the money and then because about what i shared before we had stopped receiving repayments because we wanted to help our clients we had no money coming back no repayments so we were basically liquidity constrained uh you know investors uh you know stood up and has made a commitment to us to help support this program and we did something that the federal government set up that we didn't do the first time which is the cleveland fed created a liquidity facility that allows organizations like us that have participated last year to be able to finance based on the pledging of the prior loans money so that we could have something to advance so between the support that uh organizations like investors has done for us directly and what the feds are doing you know programmatically we this time have now the money that was challenge number one but i would say for our clients the issues uh have been primarily regulatory a lot of folks don't understand how this works one tweak in this second round is you had to have shown a decline in revenue from last year so it's not like the first time when people just assume you have it now you have to prove it well guess what record keeping has always been a challenge for our businesses so that's been an issue the timeliness of the guidance things have been changing now uh uh that makes it difficult but i'll take it because i'd rather have urgency than um then long delay and then we did have some technical issues when this launched uh literally uh because we rely on third parties for certain technology it wasn't set up for us to even do the work uh for a few weeks and and this process is taking longer than last time because the government is doing the diligence up front versus later um so all those things are i'd say the challenges our clients have faced but good news on the way um i believe uh just this week uh the congress uh at least the house of representatives voting to expand or extend the program to end of may so for anyone listening that thinks okay this program ends in march it's very unlikely that this is going to extend a few more months so if you haven't taken advantage please do so and then the solution to these challenges frankly is work with people one-on-one and that's what we've been doing um so there's a lot of complication out there there's a lot of information and misinformation the best thing to do is have someone work with you one-on-one which is what we do to help guide you through that uh there's no shortcuts in life you just do the work uh head down get it done i have had the pleasure this evening of speaking to paul quintero ceo of ascendus a new york-based cdfi and paul as we close out here with my final question how can folks learn more about ascendance your mission and get in contact with you i think the simplest way is visit the website www.ascendus that's ascend and us sendest.org or if you know that you're interested in in either a ppp program or other loan call us at 1-800-245-0783 again 1-800-245-0783 again we're here not to transact with you we're here to hopefully help transform you in a positive way through entrepreneurship you've been listening to paul quintero ceo of ascendis some incredible content as to how startups and low-to-moderate income business owners have been able to succeed this past year during the pandemic paul thanks for joining us and have a great week ahead thank you very much mike be well this has been another great episode of mind your business tonight's guest host mike mcintyre of investors bank my guest tonight randy pierce president and ceo of the brooklyn chamber of commerce john harmon president and ceo of the new jersey african american chamber of commerce tom grech president and ceo of the queen's chamber of commerce and paul quintero ceo of ascendis a new york-based cdfi for more information or to see other shows go to 710 wor and i heart radio station radio.com or on the youtube channel at mindyourbusiness thanks again and have a great week