Small Business and Job Creation in Rhode Island: A Strategy for Sustainable Growth

Small Business and Job Creation in Rhode Island: A Strategy for Sustainable Growth

GUESTS:

Nina Pande, Skills RI

Matt Spoehr, SBA

Jim Cohill, Bank Newport

This episode explores the critical role of small businesses in Rhode Island's economic landscape. Featuring insights from leaders across banking, workforce development, and government, it emphasizes collaborative efforts to foster job growth, access to capital, and entrepreneurial success that benefits the entire community.

In this episode:

• The importance of small business in Rhode Island’s job creation goals and how it shapes economic policy
• Key initiatives like the Small Business Summit and their role in workforce upskilling and resource sharing
• How local financial institutions humanize lending processes to support new and existing entrepreneurs
• The significance of regional thinking and cross-sector collaboration for scalable business growth
• Challenges faced by small businesses, including access to funding, technology adoption, and navigating government contracts
• The upcoming Small Business Week and the Rhode Island Small Business Summit as vital opportunities for networking and development
• Practical advice from banking and SBA representatives on reducing barriers and demystifying financial resources
• Why investing in small businesses is essential for sustainable, inclusive economic growth in Rhode Island

Timestamps:
00:00 - Overview of Rhode Island's job creation efforts and small business importance

00:30 - Introducing the panel and their roles in economic development

01:22 - The vital contribution of small businesses and individual proprietors

01:33 - Jim Cohill discusses commercial lending and support for small businesses

02:11 - The interconnectedness of public and private sector efforts in job growth

02:33 - Matt Spear on SBA programs and resource partnerships

03:19 - The challenge of small business growth and the upcoming Small Business Week events

03:49 - The significance of connecting ideas, funding, and workforce support

04:05 - Nina Pande on adult workforce upskilling and technology modernization in small companies

05:29 - The role of free resources and community outreach in easing entrepreneurial fears

06:36 - Jim’s perspective on humanizing banking and supporting business start-ups

07:03 - Jim on the importance of transparent conversations for new entrepreneurs

08:03 - The need for broader awareness of available resources and government contracting opportunities

09:16 - Fight the intimidation: humanizing banking to unlock small business potential

10:38 - The role of small business in Rhode Island’s economic future, not just reliance on large firms

12:09 - How developing small businesses supports regional growth and job creation

13:09 - Opportunities for small and mid-sized firms in the regional economy

14:48 - The collaborative spirit needed among Rhode Island’s businesses and institutions

15:14 - The upcoming Small Business Summit as a platform to network and leverage resources

16:06 - Closing remarks emphasizing community an

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Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:00

All right, we've been talking about, obviously been thinking about quite a bit job creation, just jobs in general in Rhode Island. That's one of the hallmarks of Governor McKee's really his 2030 campaign or promise or however you want to frame it, J O B S jobs. The question a lot of Rhode Islanders are left asking is do we have those jobs? And also, if we get them, do we have people who know how to do them? That's the basic question. We have a roundtable discussion for you right now that'll touch on some specific events that are happening and some of the relationships in the private and public sector that are asking that very question. I think the best thing to do is for everyone to introduce themselves. We'll associate the voice with the person and get right into it. Nina, if you wouldn't mind starting.

SPEAKER_00 0:42

Certainly, Bill. So Nina Pandey, I'm the executive director at Skills for Rhode Island's Future. And we focus on the people part of economic development here in the state through adult workforce development. We also do quite a bit with college and career readiness, making sure that youth have access to opportunities. And the newest to our lineup for the last few years, we've been focusing on small business development through our Rhode Island Small Business Hub Initiative, which is another form of employment, right? It is self-employment. And so when traditional employment is not an option for some, we look at self-employment as part of that economic driver here in the state of Rhode Island.

SPEAKER_03 1:21

No doubt that small businesses and even individual proprietors are a huge driver of job creation anywhere, but particularly in Rhode Island. Jim, if you'd introduce yourself, please.

SPEAKER_02 1:33

Yeah, hi. I'm uh Jim Cohill, Director of Commercial Lending at Bank Newport. Um I oversee the commercial uh team here at Bank Newport. Responsibility kind of helping uh small businesses through the growth of their business, whether it's acquisition, uh buying a piece of real estate, buying a piece of equipment, needing a line of credit to you know oversee kind of the day-to-day expenses of a business. And uh we work, you know, pretty much exclusively with the the private sector, uh, but we do intertwine on the on the public side as well. Um and yeah, here to you know kind of shed some light on what's going on in small business in Rhode Island.

SPEAKER_03 2:10

Yeah. And again, that is a critical part of this. We're trying to paint for you. If you haven't noticed yet, that this is a lot of moving pieces that go into every nuanced part of our job creation, of our small business environment, of an individual proprietor environment. And uh that's what we're presenting for you here. Matt, if you do the honors of closing us out with these, this is a little bit long, sorry, intros.

SPEAKER_01 2:33

Absolutely. Thanks, Bill. Uh my name is Matt Sperr. I'm the deputy district director for the U.S. Small Business Administration's Rhode Island District Office. Uh, we are a team of seven uh here in uh downtown Providence, and our district uh is one of 68 offices around the country. We take care of the state of Rhode Island. So everyone that works here uh, you know, lives in Rhode Island, eats in Rhode Island, raises family in Rhode Island. And uh, so our agency helps small businesses start, grow, expand, succeed through a number of our programs. And we partner with folks like Skills for Rhode Island Future and Nina's team has been fantastic. Our resource partners that we fund, we have SBA lenders such as Bank Newport that help bring in the capital piece and whatnot. So we're we're really uh, you know, the a point where a lot of folks come to and then we help get them connected to a lot of the the resources that help them grow along the way.

SPEAKER_03 3:18

Yeah. That growth piece is uh the challenge for so many small businesses. We're heading into for for so many people, frankly. I mean, let's be honest. Um National Small Business Week is coming up May 3rd through 9th. Let's start right now with an event that we're talking about it offline that that's coming up. It's really interesting. Uh, the small business summit on May 5th at the Crown Plaza. This is the kind of stuff that you know piques a lot of people's interest because it connects the dots. If each of you could kind of talk about right now why it's so important for us from a small business ecology standpoint to connect the dots, uh, whether that be ideas, funding, infrastructure support, and also potential employees or partners.

SPEAKER_02 4:04

You want to kick us off, Nina?

SPEAKER_00 4:05

Sure. I'm happy to jump in here. So, Bill, uh two years ago, our agency and the SBA, uh, we've been partnering on National Small Business Week now, actually going on three years. Last year was our inaugural summit, and it really came about after many months of conversations about small businesses, uh, the owners needing to continuously upskill, reskill, and keep up with trends. You know, we talk about that a lot on the adult workforce side, and we've had major initiatives here in the state of Rhode Island to make sure that we have people who are keeping up with emerging technologies, making sure that they're modernizing uh their own personal skills. Well, that extends to small businesses as well, right? Because again, they are self-employed at the end of the day. And as we've been seeing really sweeping changes in how businesses are operating today, and I think COVID really accelerated the need for modernization, um, we felt it imperative, right? SBA, our organization, and others felt it really critical that we bring real connected learning uh in a professional development environment for small businesses. Um, oftentimes their learning ends when they finish school, um, and and they need to continue just like with adult workforce development. And and Matt, I know that this is something that you've been trying to work on at SBA for a while.

SPEAKER_01 5:28

No, absolutely. I think one of the biggest things uh you know with small business owners, they just don't know what they don't know. And there's so many different things that are out there, so many different resources that they either don't know about or they look at and they have a great website and they go, oh, let me go pay this consultant uh you know X number of dollars per hour. When there are so many free resources, and that's you know something that people don't quite recognize. I mean, you talk federal government, uh, the warm and fuzzies probably don't come to mind right away. But with SBA and our partners and who we work with, all these resources that our agency through our partners we provide are free of charge. And that the summit is a great culmination of sort of showing that collaboration between us and the small business you know landscape and all the partners around the state, whether they're funded by SBA or not. You can show up and learn about just, hey, how do I put together a cohesive business plan to bring so I can go over to Jim and talk about getting some funding to expand my business or start it to utilizing AI in my business and so on and so forth. So we want to make sure that we're able to convene the small business community in one place throughout the day and give them exposure to all of this that they might not have known. It's okay they don't know that, but now we can help connect them to that to help them with whatever they might need.

SPEAKER_03 6:34

Yeah, and Jim, it it you could touch on the role that that you play. I think the lending environment is an intimidating place for whether, and by the way, this is if you're starting your first business, this is if you're in you're an experienced entrepreneur because you're working with different vehicles and scenarios. So from your standpoint, how do you humanize the work that you do to say, hey, you've got an idea and we can make this happen? And by the way, yeah, there's risk, but it's not insane.

SPEAKER_02 7:02

Yeah, no, it's a great question. Ultimately, what I can tell you about the summit from my experience of have attending and been on the panel, it's a moment of transparency. It's a moment for all of these small businesses to come in. And whether you're at the infancy stage, as you mentioned, or you're a little bit more uh experienced and you're looking at your second business, there is room to have a conversation for everything. Uh so if we're starting on the infancy side, there's a host of programs, resources. Uh, I myself, and we talked a little bit about the collaboration of the uh of all the speakers on the phone today on the call today. Uh, we partner with Matt, we partner with the SBA for some of those newer businesses that are starting up and need access to capital. And there's there's free advice to be given all day long there, which is a beautiful thing because you will sometimes hear, and I've I've heard this kind of myth before, that I don't know where to start, or I'm afraid to ask a question around how to get access to capital. But the conversation is where it really starts in speaking to people that are providing that capital. Uh, I myself last year had probably 20 to 25 conversations with people that just didn't know where to start and how many different organizations are available within the state of Rhode Island that are willing to have that initial conversation to point you in the right direction. Uh, so I saw that at the summit as just a such a great starting point for uh you know small businesses that are either entering the state or just entering uh into formation uh altogether. And then for your mid-tier and larger size, it's an opportunity to go a little bit deeper around how do I grow? How do I compete? How do I leverage things like AI and you know combat fraud and accept payments and be safe about how I run my business? How do I find the people? Because we always talk about, you know, more jobs, more jobs. There are also jobs out there that self-employed people can't seem to find help for. So we connect the, we connect the on that front as well and try to collaborate in a way to meet you and meet your business where it needs at all phases, whether it's infinite or all the way through the accelerated phase.

SPEAKER_00 9:15

And Bill, if I can just jump in here, if you wouldn't mind, off of Jim, and you know, something I heard Jim talk about at last year's summit, it was to really humanize the experience of what it's like to go into a bank, right? So many people are intimidated and they don't think of the bank or they don't think of the SBA office as their starting point. A lot of times they look at it as their end point. Um, and so we're really trying to give people that perspective that shifts. Um, and one of the things that we do with Bank Newport, not just at the summit, but all year long, is we have them come and talk as a lender to small businesses to really help reduce that fear and anxiety of saying, oh, you know what, my credit score may not be good enough, or, you know, my my bank account may not be as much as I need to go into a bank and think through those things. We really try to eliminate those barriers or those kind of self, you know, self-fulfilling ideas that people have in their head about, oh, I I don't have, I'm not good enough to get a loan or I can't do this. Um, and so we really try to bring it down so that every Rhode Islander sees themselves in this space. And if Jim can't do it, and if Matt can't do it, then how do we help you find other resources? And I think that I want to underscore what Matt and Jill Jim said about it's really connecting people with there's not just one, there's hundreds of opportunities out there.

SPEAKER_03 10:37

Right. I I I completely agree. We just have a few moments left here, and I want to react to something and sort of also note how I opened up this podcast, which is talking about job creation. Look, the reality is right now, large firms are by and large, not exclusively, and there are sectors where this is absolutely the opposite. But we're seeing a movement away from Rhode Island from large firms, at least on the headline level. The small business sector, the micro business sector, it is an area for job creation that we have to think about. We cannot swing for home runs and count on that to produce jobs in Rhode Island. We have a robust small business and creative sector that we have to harvest it in. That's my view. That's my assessment, which is why I think small business growth is equivalent to the job creation conversation. And I will react to uh an interview I heard with Rick Simone, Federal Hill Commerce Association, Rollin's Small Business Association, where they were talking about a job fair they were having and the number of full-time jobs that they're offering. But when you press, you're talking about seasonal employment. That's not it either. We need people who are skilled with whether it's AI or any number of other contemporary and into the future type of skills and the businesses that are supported by all the institutions on this call today to grow. This is a civic situation here. I'll ask each of you to react to that the moment here in Rhode Island, why it's critical that we invest in small businesses.

SPEAKER_00 12:08

Yeah, I'm I'm happy to start and why we do it, because we completely agree that our path forward for economic development is not on the backs of two or three large corporations. It is with the development of small business. And I think, Bill, how we're trying to get people to think about their small business is sure, you might start small here in Rhode Island, but we're also trying to build a regional mindset. We have some incredible sole proprietors, some consultants. How do we help them think about their business differently so that they can become the ones who are employing other people? We have great artisans that are here, great graphic designers, people who are incredibly tech savvy. We we made a lot of investments on the adult workforce side, and we're starting to see in the tech industry either no hiring or they're starting their layoffs because of AI. Well, how do we get those individuals to actually think about starting their own consulting firm? Because there are going to be small and mid-sized companies who need that type of tech talent, who can't afford some of the large consulting firms. So how do we get them to think about that? Um, that's part of what we're going to be talking about at the summit, right? Is how do you look at growth and expansion, not just in Rhode Island, but within the region, Massachusetts, Connecticut. There's a lot of economic activity that I think our small businesses can take advantage of. Um, and another big thing is teaching them how to properly contract with the government. That is a major, major opportunity that I think a lot of small businesses here in the state miss out on.

SPEAKER_03 13:39

Yeah, you could get a PhD in Sam.gov. We've got 90 seconds left if we could get a reaction on that from both Jim and Matt.

SPEAKER_02 13:47

Yes, I'll I'll I'll jump in if that's okay, Matt. So, you know, I I agree with you wholeheartedly, Bill. Easy come, easy go with the large corporate businesses. For me, organic growth of Rhode Island is dependent upon small business infrastructure. And you know, when you think about that, um, you know, it aligns to our mission. There's two things that you'll you'll see a lot of from an advertisement standpoint about Bank Newport, being the business bank of Rhode Island and Shop 401. And what each of those mean is how do we provide access to capital to as many small businesses as possible to help them fulfill and achieve their dreams of being an entrepreneur and completing that cycle and growing the business and hiring more people and whether it's multi-location and things of that nature. And Shop 401 is where we try to highlight those businesses. No longer is it just about banking them, it's also helping from a marketing standpoint. So if you've ever been to Clemys or if you've ever been to Chomp um or some of the other businesses that we've highlighted, it isn't about us. It's about how we can help them uh become a bigger, better version of themselves through their uh through their their partnership with us. So I agree with you wholeheartedly, and I think that it's gonna take all of us. Uh, I've learned a lot about Rhode Island over the six years that I've been here or seven now. And one thing is that it's a very small niche community, but we also don't do a good enough job of collaborating enough across the state. And that's where I think there's a huge opportunity, and attending this summit is just one way to do that.

SPEAKER_03 15:14

I could not agree more with that statement, Jim.

SPEAKER_01 15:16

Matt, taking us home. Absolutely. No, I our unofficial state motto here in Rhode Island is I know a guy. And so we are uniquely situated geographically between Mass and Connecticut. So we have a lot of access to a lot of different businesses, but you just don't know who's in a room with you. So the summit, like Jim and Nina said, it's a first opportunity to come in and find out who those people are because you're not in it alone. It doesn't matter whether you're working for someone right now and you're looking to get out, maybe you just got laid off, or you've always sort of dabbled with the idea of having your own business. There is someone there who is going to walk with you along the way. We are all working together with this. So it it it it's it's scary, right? If it was easy to own your own business, everyone would do it. But there are so many resources out here available through all of us and our partners to help you with it that it we want it to be less scary for folks to come out and say, Hey, can you help me with this? And that's what we're looking to do on May 5th.

SPEAKER_03 16:05

Matt, Jim, Nina, thank you all for your time today. May 5th, Crown Plaza. Uh, you may remember it from your high school prom. You that may be your most recent association. Uh, you'll have a better time this time, guaranteed.