Lending where banks dare not
Entrepreneur Jane Stout briefly tried to obtain financing from a bank to start her grocery business in Port Chester, an unusual retail venture for Westchester County. Instead of that conventional lending route, she found what she needed through a nonprofit agency that works with small-business owners in the region, many of whom have been turned down for loans by banks.
Stout operates That Discount Place, a 3,500-square-foot grocery in former warehouse space at 155 Irving Ave. that sells foods in damaged packaging or past their stamped expiration dates. The goods typically are priced at 30 percent to 60 percent below those at conventional grocery stores.
“It”™s basically the first market in this part of the country,” she said. Discount groceries are popular in the South and Midwest. In her youth, Stout worked at her family”™s three discount groceries in Indiana.
Formerly the chief operating officer at a Manhattan marketing and production company, Stout saw her position eliminated following a company merger. “I had a forced opportunity to do something that I had been really wanting to do for a long time” as a discount-grocery pioneer, she said.
Stout was referred by a New York State Small Business Development Center adviser to Community Capital Resources in Hawthorne, the U.S. Small Business Administration microlender for Westchester and five other Hudson Valley counties and the largest nonprofit lender in the region. “I just basically needed to get my hands on $50,000 and they were able to accommodate me.” She opened her business in late October.
Community Capital could not have made a loan in that amount until about 18 months ago, when the SBA raised its program loan cap from $25,000 to $50,000 as part of the federal economic-recovery stimulus package.
“This is a very expensive part of the country to be opening a business in,” said Tamara Underwood, director of small business lending and support at Community Capital, which also has offices at the Orange County Business Accelerator in New Windsor and at the Dutchess County Regional Chamber of Commerce in Poughkeepsie. Previous SBA loan limits were too low for Westchester, she said.
Even with the loan-cap increase, “We see businesses that need more than $50,000,” she said.
Since the recession and the credit crisis that began in 2008, “We saw a big increase in demand for our loans,” Underwood said. Some businesses in 2009 had their lines of credit closed out by banks and severe cash flow problems. “The banks had kind of packed up and shut down” their lending, she said. Community Capital began to see more mature companies and businesses with higher revenues as clients.
The agency”™s average small-business term loan has more than doubled since the recession, from $11,000 to $12,000 prior to 2008 to $24,000 to $26,000 in 2011. Community Capital, though, still has only one client with annual revenue of more than $1 million, Underwood said.
One year ago, the agency launched a lending partnership with the city of Yonkers and the state”™s Empire State Development Corp. Tapping Empire State Development”™s small business revolving loan fund, Community Capital matches dollar-for-dollar the amount of a commercial loan made by Yonkers from its Community Development Block Grant fund. The partnership provides small loans of $25,000 or less and larger loans that range from $25,000 to $250,000. Only businesses that have been operating for two years or more are eligible for the larger loans.
Five Yonkers businesses received loans of $25,000 or less in the partnership”™s inaugural year. Three companies have received larger loans and another business is about to close on a $100,00 loan, Underwood said.
From his Yonkers home, Marvin Vasquez operates Multi Marketing USA, an Internet and social-media marketing and website development business he launched in 2010. When he decided to take his startup “to the next level” last year, Vasquez knew from his brother, a Webster Bank employee, that banks would not approve the loan he sought for working capital and to invest in hardware and software equipment.
“I think financial institutions haven”™t grasped how lucrative this (web) business can be,” he said. “That was one of the challenges that we had to overcome.”
Referred to Community Capital Resources by his brother, Vasquez obtained the financing he needed. His business location in Yonkers, where the lending partnership operates, “gave me an extra push,” he said. He has hired a graphic designer to join him and his wife in the business.
“It was a very interesting process,” said Vasquez. “It”™s not as easy as people think to get funded.”