Recognition nice, but fixing known issues bigger deal

GOING GREEN: John Wood II, left, owner of Green Grocer, was the recipient of the Rhode Island Veteran-Owned Small Business of the Year award. He is pictured above with Kitchen Manager Court Corbishley. / PBN PHOTO/RUPERT WHITELEY
GOING GREEN: John Wood II, left, owner of Green Grocer, was the recipient of the Rhode Island Veteran-Owned Small Business of the Year award. He is pictured above with Kitchen Manager Court Corbishley. / PBN PHOTO/RUPERT WHITELEY

It’s not that having an awards luncheon calling attention to some of the Ocean State’s biggest small-business success stories is not a big deal, because it is.
It’s just that there is much more to the small-business story in Rhode Island than the achievements of nine business owners and community leaders. Just ask one of the winners.
Lt. Gov. Elizabeth H. Roberts, who will receive the U.S. Small Business Administration’s Rhode Island District Director Award at the June 4 “Rhode Island Salute to Small Business,” has worked closely with the SBA and the R.I. Commerce Corporation to address issues raised by the Rhode Island business community in her role as chairwoman of the R.I. Small Business Advocacy Council.
Issues including workforce training and professional development, unemployment insurance, biweekly pay and others have been recent topics of interest to the council, which works with local business and state leaders to make recommendations for executive and legislative action, and encourages small business in the state. Roberts views this collaboration as critical to the success of the council’s efforts.
“A lot of the goals that come out of the [Rhode Island economic] summits align with our goals. We use our [council] meetings to bring in state leaders to move those issues forward,” said Roberts. She touts the council as a “one-stop shop” of sorts, where all the players are in one room, creating ways to push forward small-business issues, voiced by the small-business community. She sees this as a focused approach to improving the small-business climate in the state.
“To me, so much of it is really about a commitment and a culture,” said Roberts. “Having a partnership approach rather than regulatory approach means that people on the regulatory side are saying, ‘Let’s get this done as quickly as we can and be as direct and open as we can possibly be.’ [It helps us] get rid of rules that don’t make sense and move forward on the ones that do.”
Concurring is SBA Rhode Island District Director Mark S. Hayward. “The legislature has moved in the right direction, but there’s a definite need that we continue to focus on how to make it easier for small businesses here in Rhode Island. Ultimately, if we continue to march down this road, changing regulations focusing on access to capital in Rhode Island has a tremendous advantage.” Next month’s “Salute to Small Business,” to be held at Alpine Country Club in Cranston, is part of the yearly national program by the SBA to celebrate small businesses, including the just-concluded National Small Business Week, which has been a national event since 1963. But as Hayward and Roberts acknowledged, the celebration is only one step in a continuing battle to help small business succeed.
The SBA’s Rhode Island office provides counseling and other forms of assistance to small businesses, as well as its extensive lending program. In fiscal 2013, roughly $90 million was funneled to Rhode Island small businesses through the agency’s products. And so far in fiscal 2014 (which began Oct. 1, 2013), lending through the SBA has shown a 20 percent year-over-year increase.
But for some, success is determined by far more than access to capital. Laura M. Ernst, president of Land & Coastal Services LLC in East Greenwich, and winner of the SBA’s Rhode Island Microenterprise of the Year, suggests that legislators look to Massachusetts for ideas on how best to improve Rhode Island’s regulatory regime, which has a reputation of putting roadblocks in the way of small business.
“We’re a small state, and we compete a lot with other businesses from out of state,” said Ernst. “Massachusetts has the Small Business Purchasing Program, which sets aside a percent of annual procurement expenditures for small businesses that actually have their offices in the state.”
The Small Business Purchasing Program encourages the state to spend 2.5 percent of its annual procurement expenditures to participating Massachusetts small businesses.
“It makes sense,” she said. “Keep the money in the state and set it aside for small business. I think that’s something we need to look at more closely. We talk a lot about getting the economy going [and] one of the ways we can do that is to insure some of the money that is expended stays in the state.”
Ernst, who started Land & Coastal Services, an environmental consulting company, in 2008, differs from many entrepreneurs because she had an existing business network to turn to for advice. “My approach was if I want to grow; how do I do that? I started making some calls. Several key people – who had been owners of larger businesses or had been in consulting businesses – were very helpful in getting me suggestions. When it comes down to it, it depends on the individual person,” Ernst said.
“Rhode Island lags far behind the rest of New England in regards to its focus on small-business development,” said John H. Wood II, the owner of Green Grocer and recipient of the Rhode Island Veteran-Owned Small Business of the Year award. “I think that in regards to lenders in the state, there [are] maybe three or four focused on small-business lending because that … is a lot of work for the lenders to go through, which may be one of the reasons many of them don’t.”
“We worked with [Coastway Community Bank] over the last eight years, and it has been a lot of work on both our parts to get the SBA to come to the table and make arrangements, changes, adjustments along the way to better fit our business needs,” Wood said. “If it had not been for Coastway’s perseverance and their desire to see us succeed I don’t think that the SBA would have been as helpful as they have been for us. I think that’s the nature of the beast. [The SBA] is a government-based institution and they have a lot of steps and procedures and requirements for them to do the business that they do.”
Still, he added, “as far as the services go, anyone who takes the time to scratch the surface of what the SBA or other … institutions offer they will find that there’s a lot of services free of charge.”
When it comes to raising capital, many of the SBA award winners found the help they needed through the state’s small-business lenders, including Freedom National Bank and Coastway.
Denise DiDonato, former vice president of small-business lending for Freedom National Bank and the SBA’s Financial Services Champion of the Year, worked exclusively with small businesses during her tenure at the bank (DiDonato has since moved on to Savings Institute Bank & Trust in credit and commercial administration).
“The bank wanted to find ways to make an effective difference in the community during a time when the economy wasn’t doing well, [so] we created a platform to be able to help a lot of customers who were disappointed with the larger banks,” said DiDonato. “A significant amount of people were helped [through our small-business department]. The approval ratio was 50 percent.”
Solutions to meet the needs of small businesses remain a mixed bag, but one thing everyone can agree on is that it is important not to underplay recognizing the businesses that have grown despite economic challenges. Not only does the recognition help keep the goal of small-business ownership tangible, it gives small-business advocates and legislators the chance to measure the impact of services and programs they offer.
The full list of winners to be recognized at the “Rhode Island Salute to Small Business” is as follows:
• 2014 Rhode Island Small Business Person of the Year – Lisa Mattiello, owner, Pranzi Catering & Events, Providence. Year founded: 1997; number of employees: 125.
• Rhode Island SBA Young Entrepreneur of the Year – Bianca Alicea, owner, ChubbyChicoCharms LLC, North Providence. Year founded: 2005; number of employees: 14.
• Rhode Island Veteran-owned Small Business of the Year – John H. Wood II, owner, Green Grocer, Portsmouth. Year founded: 2007; number of employees: 14.
• Rhode Island Woman-owned Small Business of the Year – Lori Duquette, owner, Duquette Family Eye Care Inc., North Smithfield. Year founded: 2010; number of employees: 10.
• Rhode Island and New England Minority-owned Small Business of the Year – Miguelina Dominguez and Roberto Castellano, co-owners, RCM Cleaning LLC, Providence. Year founded: 2008; number of employees: 17.
• The Joseph G.E. Knight Award for Entrepreneurial Excellence – Herrick & White Architectural Woodworkers, Cumberland. Year founded: 1977; number of employees: 98.
• Rhode Island Microenterprise of the Year – Laura M. Ernst, president, Land & Coastal Services LLC, East Greenwich. Year founded: 2008; number of employees: 5.
• Financial Services Champion of the Year – Denise DiDonato, former vice president, small-business lending, Freedom National Bank, Cumberland and Greenville.
• Rhode Island District Director Award – Lt. Gov. Elizabeth H. Roberts. •

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