The head of the SBA, Karen Mills, has announced her resignation. During her four years in office, the 98% of Asian American-owned businesses that are small received very few loans and close to zero technical assistance.
President Obama, however, has a unique opportunity to ensure that the SBA is truly a small business agency that helps struggling small businesses and creates significant opportunities for millions of new American entrepreneurs to grow and prosper.
Our recommendation is that the President appoint an Asian American who is sympathetic and knowledgeable about small business concerns and committed to being a strong advocate for job development through small business creation.
Such an Asian American appointee will allow the President to kill two birds with one stone. He could change the direction of an organization that has been heavily criticized for ignoring the role of small businesses in job creation. And, he can address a major problem with his new cabinet, a cabinet that has been criticized as heavy on white men. (The SBA was recently given cabinet-like status by the President.)
Recently, the NAAC addressed the SBA Roundtable in Los Angeles on behalf of two million Asian America-owned businesses. We stressed that the SBA must live up to its name of small. That is, it must do more to advocate for, secure for and provide technical assistance for truly small businesses. We made four suggestions that most of the Asian American business leaders at the SBA Roundtable seem to strongly support. These suggestions might be an innovative beginning for our new SBA administrator when she is appointed.
First, provide technical assistance directly and indirectly to the 98% of minority-owned businesses that have one million dollars or less in revenue. Three thousand dollars in technical assistance could, according to our state’s micro-business nonprofit CAMEO, create 2-3 jobs per business. One hundred million dollars could create up to thirty thousand jobs.
Second, focus on lending under $250,000 to small businesses and ensure that at least 75% of all loans are in this category.
Third, develop an innovative micro-lending program of $50,000 and under loans. The loan form should be one page, not require a CPA to fill out and be fully processed within ten days.
Fourth, the new head of the SBA should, within her first 60 days in office, convene a meeting with the twenty-five largest foundations and twenty-five largest financial institutions to discuss how they can help the SBA achieve these three goals of helping twenty-nine million small businesses.
We are aware that many foundations and financial institutions fund small businesses and micro-businesses. But, their programs are uncoordinated and often inadequately funded. The new SBA leader has a unique opportunity to bring these resources together to create a Platinum Standard and provide an innovative approach for small business development.
President Obama is aware that the SBA is presently providing far more funding to large businesses through multimillion dollar loans than any other administration in history. It is time to change the direction back to the original purposes of the SBA.
The Federal Reserve has acknowledged that more than half of all new jobs are created by small businesses and that without small business job creation, the real unemployment rate (including discouraged workers) will remain at 15% in the US and possibly at 20% in states with very high unemployment rates, such as California. (California is tied with Mississippi and Nevada as the states with the highest unemployment rates in the nation.)
(Faith Bautista & Jason Hobson)
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Faith Bautista is President and CEO of the National Asian American Coalition, a leading HUD-approved housing counseling agency headquartered in the San Francisco area and with a regulatory and congressional liaison office in Washington, D.C.
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Jason Hobson is an experienced real estate and business attorney. Jason brings his experience as in-house counsel for a national company and an attorney for an international law firm to his representation of large and small companies engaged in real estate and business ventures across the United States and abroad.
