Today's Guest

Tee Rowe is the President and CEO of the Association of Small Business Development Centers, a nationwide network of over 1,000 centers providing free, confidential counseling and low-cost training to small business owners. Matthew Gourgeot is the Director of the Thryv Foundation and helps to shape the Foundation’s vision, direction, and strategic partnerships. Both share the resources their organizations have made available to help small businesses during the pandemic.

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Episode Summary

The SBDC helps small businesses with management assistance, technical assistance, and business planning. Whereas the SBA is more of a financial partner in helping small businesses obtain loans. The SBDC and SBA are really two sides of a coin with both organizations focused on helping foster small business in America. 

The Thryv Foundation is the charitable arm of Thryv Inc. and we empower, develop, and invest in small businesses across America. We host webinars and seminars for small business owners or those looking to start a small business. Additionally, we provide in-kind donations and small business grants to help small business owners. We also announced our partnership with the SBDC in March on National SBDC Day. 

The biggest thing for small business owners to do is, develop a strategy on how to best use the government assistance resources available. That way your business will be in a good position once the stay-at-home orders are lifted and people begin to get back out. Let’s start with the paycheck protection program (PPP), which allows businesses to borrow up to 10 million dollars to cover payroll. You can borrow that money at 1 percent interest for 2 years, but the kicker is if you use 75 percent of it to cover payroll then that money is forgivable. For a lot of small businesses, their payroll is much less than 75 percent of their monthly expenses. That is where programs like the EIDL kick in, you can apply for those through the SBA website, where you can get up to 2 million dollars for a 30-year term at 3.75 percent. 

At the Thryv Foundation, we launched our Small Business Grant program last week, and this week we started sending grants out to the first wave of recipients. I spent the last couple of days talking to small business owners across the country and I kept hearing that they had applied for the PPP loan but haven’t received the $10,000 advance they were told would happen. The holdup is that the SBA and treasury are still working out the final guidance on how the loans will be purchased from the banks. The treasury is also working to bring more lenders online so that the loans are more accessible. 

Resources Shared

• SBDC
• SBA
• Thryv Foundation
• Thryv Adapt
  

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