 Welcome to Adventures in Small Business. This broadcast is a collaborative effort between the U.S. Small Business Administration, the Hawaii District Office of the SBA, the Small Business Development Centers, also known as the SBDCs, and the Patsy Mink Business and Leadership Center, as well as the VBAC Veterans Business Outreach Center of the Pacific. So those four business resource partners are available to all of you in the state of Hawaii. In particular, I am from the Small Business Development Centers, and I am the state director. My name is Kathy Wiltsi, and I wanted to basically today go a little bit off of what we normally do is feature success stories of our clients, but due to a scheduling change, I'm here today to just tell you more about who the Hawaii SBDC is and how they can help you, particularly if you are a small business in the state of Hawaii. So the SBDC is a business assistance program. We offer one-on-one business counseling to both existing businesses and people who want to start a business in the state. The SBDCs are readily accessible because we have offices on five different offices on four islands. There are two on the big island, Hawaii Island, an office in Hilo and an office in Kona, and also offices on Maui, Oahu, and Kauai. So we are available on each of the islands, so that's a definite benefit. We are not just on Oahu. Many people think that the assistance available is only Oahu-centric, and we are definitely not. So I wanted to make sure everyone understood that. Primarily, we offer a lot of services, and the best way to learn more about us and access our information is at our website, which is hisbdc.org, so hawaisbdc.org. On that website, as soon as you log in, you would see a home page that has a list of services and many of the features, and even our locations, the details on where you can find us, information on how you would sign up for services, both one-on-one counseling and for our training events. The one-on-one counseling is a free service because we are funded in part by the SBA as well as we have state matching funding in order to bring this program to the Hawaii residents. And we also offer very low-cost events based on recognized needs of the businesses and what we are told is relevant to helping businesses out. The services you will see listed on that home page include business strategy and planning, capitalization and funding resources, financial management, human resources management, marketing strategies, which include both traditional marketing approaches for business as well as more recently a focus on how to utilize social media as a way to reach out to the public and or perhaps your other business clients that you may sell to. We also do feasibility studies, so that is generally if people are looking at a USDA alone, often in the agricultural area, we can assist with feasibility studies and make your company or your idea presentable or viable for developing financing. We also offer government contracting now, so if you are a regular business who sells business to business or to the general public, that is one area of service. The second area of service is for general contract or government contracting. And when we say government contracting, we mean all the way from federal procurement and purchasing to county and excuse me, and state here in the state of Hawaii. So we're working closely with the state offices of procurement and we will be bringing additional information to you and additional training as their new approach to state government contracting is rolled out. Another feature that often is not readily understood is we have a separate entity called the Hawaii Business Research Library, which is part of our organization and it's in the county of Maui, but we service business clients statewide. And the types of research that we can do are, for example, sample business plans, profiles of what a business may be looking for as it relates to competitive, potential competitive companies out there. We can draw up some very specific information for that. And that's also available if you look on our homepage and the services section of what we offer. One thing I would like to talk about now is a little bit of the numbers and how many people we've served over the last year. I'm going to be sharing with you the information on our 2017 results, which actually are very good and we're very proud of the efforts that we have been able to accomplish. In 2017, we served over 1,300 business clients in the state of Hawaii. We created 363 jobs and it says 373 on there, sorry about that. We have 98 business starts, so those were people who had an idea for a business or who were purchasing a business and we were able to provide assistance to them to get that business started and actually set up their licensing and registration and that kind of thing. Capital infusion is a very important accomplishment because it measures the assistance that businesses have received from our counseling in order for them to get, for example, capital into their business. So this number, the 29,415,734, actually shows, it includes the numbers of investment, capital infusion investment by the owner. It includes bank loans, SBA loans, potentially USDA or other government loans, but it is a real reflection on what we've been able to add to the economy here in Hawaii as a result of our efforts. You can also see that we did over 90 business workshops last year and again those are on all islands so you can, the web page indicates to you exactly which classes are on which islands you are able to go to any that seem appropriate for you and you actually sign up by going on to the website and register for classes. The SBDC clients versus average businesses charts here talk about what business in Hawaii accomplishes as far as sales growth and employment growth. The red part is other businesses, not other businesses in Hawaii that just in general, so it's just normal statistics and then the other numbers, the results that were achieved by long-term clients, you can see that for the increase in sales, 14.1% of our clients, they had a growth rate, I'm sorry, of 14.1% compared to other businesses at 4.8% and likewise in the increase in employment, regular businesses were 1.4% and the SBDC client improvement in number of jobs was 13% compared to the 1.4. 98% of our clients found that our services are beneficial and 100% of clients surveyed would recommend our services. Over the last several years, there's a second page to this chart, we actually reflect the numbers and the trends that have been demonstrated and over five years, for example, our capital infusion number was very close to $140 million. We've had over 1400 long-term clients which are clients who spend five or more hours with one-on-one sessions at the SBDC. We've had 424 business starts and the total number of clients is 5,692 training events you can see have steadily increased and we've been able to reach very many people throughout the state and I wanted you to notice that the trends are generally going up so we're very proud of our results and the assistance that we can bring to our Hawaii business clients. When we come back from break, we'll talk about some other specific services and some guidance that may not be intuitively available through the SBDC. Hi, my name is Bill Sharp, host of Asian Review, coming to you from Honolulu, Hawaii, right here in the center of the Pacific Ocean. Asian Review is the oldest of the 35 or so shows broadcast by Think Tech Hawaii. We've been in production since 2009. Our goal is to provide you the viewer with information, breaking information about events in Asia, Asia being anything from Hawaii west to Pakistan, from the Russian Far East south to Australia and New Zealand. We hope to see you every Monday afternoon at 5 p.m. I'm Ethan Allen, your host on Pacific partnerships in education here on Think Tech Hawaii. Every other week, Tuesdays at 3 p.m., we have guests on and talk about the fascinating, interesting and unique partnerships in education that occur across the Pacific Islands with Hawaii, Micronesia, the Marshall Islands, Palau, Guam, all these places have really rich local education programs going on and the exchange among and between these programs is a wealth of great information helping the islands all learn how to survive and thrive in our ever-changing world. I hope you'll join us on Pacific partnerships in education. As promised, I'm going to talk about a couple of other services that are now available at the Small Business Development Centers. One area that is lately obviously very important is the area of cybersecurity. So I wanted everyone to know that there is in fact an online business assessment available on our website. So if you go to our home page and all of this that I'm going to talk about today is accessible on our home page and it features at the lower left corner, you'll see several featured links. On those links, you can connect. The third one down is a cybersecurity online assessment tool and this is both for business to business or business to consumer sales or for government contractors. So if you click on that link, it will bring you to a page that says Small Business Big Threat. Now this is a company that we and several other SBDCs around the nation work with to bring the basics of cybersecurity to businesses. We will also in the coming year be offering some of our own local classes besides this online function that is available. So where you see it say there's a logo at the top of the page once you connect to that link that says Small Business Big Threat. If you click on that logo then it will take you to a page that says how protected is your small business and then there is an option to take the online cybersecurity 101 or for government contractors there's also a version to look at your readiness or preparedness as it relates to cybersecurity issues. So that's a really good feature that we're going to be promoting and wanting people to work closely with their counselors advisors as it relates to cybersecurity. Another area that is really key is disaster preparedness. So one of the I mean as we know flooding in Kauai and Oahu the fire the Marco Polo fire on Oahu currently the lava flow and earthquakes on the Big Island are huge issues in the state of Hawaii. Besides offering our normal services to small businesses we also offer disaster assistance both on the preparedness side as well as the recovery side. So our advisors are available to work with businesses when a disaster occurs and we actually also have links on our page that identify areas other resource partners and other areas that may be of interest in both preparation for disasters as well as the the other federal or other resources that may be available. So one of the one of the available links on that page on our home page is for the Oahu community there is an Oahu disaster assistance referral listing. So that listing it's it's very busy we can't really share it on on screen live but you can download that and it actually goes into areas such as tax relief, agricultural assistance, psychological support, insurance, disaster loans, health concerns, legal concerns as it relates to disasters on Oahu so this this list gives you contact names the agency name contact names and the website or you can get additional information so that's a very valuable piece of information as it relates to disasters. As we get other counties information we will also supply direct links on our home page to those but right now we only have that that one referral guide for Oahu. In general as you know hurricane season is fast approaching and one of the things that you should take a look at on this site and this is both it could be individuals or it could be for businesses but there's a many resources available for disaster preparedness. On our site you'll see kind of a hurricane in the middle of the page down towards the bottom and it says click on this for more information. In that list or once you connect to that page you would see for example there's an SBA disaster preparedness link on there you would go into that SBA information click on planning and then there's actually a hurricane preparedness worksheet that takes you into all the details. Again a lot of information probably we couldn't possibly share all the details but just so you know it is on the website and it's readily accessible. Once a disaster actually occurs we distribute and actually then encourage businesses to use this disaster guide. This is specifically addressed for disaster recovery after something happens as agencies like SBA and FEMA and other people add to the data available on disasters then then we are able to link you to those resources as well as you can speak one on one to a counselor who can help you walk through this whole cumbersome process as you can imagine but the guide actually goes through several areas it's designed there's a workbook that you can use and make notes in there's also additional downloadable forms as it relates to the worksheets that you need to fill out and be thinking about information to pull together on your business and to prepare for your business recovery or if you're going to shut down some of the legal concerns or other issues that may be appropriate at that point in time. So again very very meaningful data that's available there we also when a disaster occurs we our advisors participate in the recovery areas and we will be with for example the county resource partners to help people through the issues that may occur after disaster. So I hope this information has been helpful to you today and you will be able to take a look at our website again that's hisbdc.org and we look forward to seeing you in our offices or in the community. Thank you so much.