The head of the U.S. Small Business Administration joined Boston Mayor Martin Walsh and several small business owners to laud the city’s efforts to improve the climate for entrepreneurs and to solicit business owners for ideas as to how the administration might better serve them.
“Let me just compliment you on the extraordinary work you’ve been doing. … We’ve been tracking you from your campaign for mayor. You were committed to helping small businesses and now you are delivering on that campaign speech,” SBA Administrator Maria Contreras-Sweet said at the top of the meeting. “We’ve been very impressed.”
Walsh kicked off the roundtable discussion at District Hall by outlining some of the initiatives he’d undertaken to help spur economic development – for instance, launching a new online permit tracking tool. He briefly discussed his goal of creating 53,000 units of new housing in the city and Imagine Boston 2030 and touted Boston’s 3.7 percent unemployment rate, to cheers prompted by Contreras-Sweet.
“We’ve been tracking the numbers, and I want to tell you that Boston is a remarkable community,” she said.
Boston is one of the strongest cities in the country for small-dollar SBA loans, just trailing the entire state of California, she said. Small-dollar loans are a particularly important measure because the SBA considers them an indication of startups, she explained.
“Today, small business is a movement. It’s an awakening. Before people might say, ‘I didn’t get that corporate job I always wanted, so maybe I’ll go into the government or just start my own business,’” she said. “Now our kids are saying, ‘We’re going to start with our own small business. We want to be our own owner, determine our own destiny,’ so we’re really heartened by what’s taking place across the country.”
Contreras-Sweet discussed a new partnership between the SBA and the National League of Cities and the SBA’s new LINC tool, aimed at better matching small business owners with lenders in their area. She also said the administration had eliminated fees on loans under $150,000 and was encouraging and training credit unions to do more small-dollar loans.
Before the roundtable’s organizers closed the meeting to media members, Contreras-Sweet asked the small business owners a few questions about their ease of finding financing. Ian So, the CEO of Chicken & Rice Guys, said that he’d wound up taking a loan from his mother because he couldn’t get a bank loan, but also said, “the great thing about food trucks is, you don’t need a lot of capital.”
Before he had to leave the meeting, Walsh singled out two restaurateurs for praise. Solomon and Rokeya Chowdhury, he said, who “took a gamble on a spot that had some challenges” when they opened their restaurant, Taste of India – Shanti, in Dorchester over a decade ago.
