 New York City, it's your mayor Eric Adams. And I'm excited to welcome you to my new podcast. Each episode I'll talk with New Yorkers inside and outside of City Hall. People who go beyond the noise and get down to the business of getting stuff done. Welcome to the Get Stuffed Done Cast. Let's get to it. I'm really excited today as we look at our Get Stuffed Done Cast. You look on our podiums, whenever we do a press conference or make an announcement, you see the thumbs up and Get Stuffed Done, something that we believe is a cornerstone of our administration of how do we get stuff done? How do we move New York City forward? We're here this afternoon with one of our commissioners, Commissioner Kim, the commission of Small Business Services. And he's going to share with you his thoughts on getting stuff done for small businesses. And I'm really happy and excited. It's a very unique story. The first Korean American to be the commissioner of Small Business Services. And he comes with the excitement that is needed. And we just wanna dig into some of the things that he's doing. Commissioner, welcome. Welcome to the podcast. Thank you, Mayor Adams. I'm really excited to be here today. Even before we get into your role as the commissioner, people sometimes believe government officials just fall from the sky, but you have your own narrative. Just who are you? And just give us a quick elevator pitch overview. I'm a son of immigrant small business owners. They came from South Korea in 1975 to Sunnyside Queens. We lived in a one bedroom. My parents, my older sister, my maternal grandmother, who basically took care of us while both my parents worked seven days a week. They would take the seven train from 40th Street Lowry station and go into Manhattan. And they had a little place, little office set up outside of Macy's on 35th and Broadway. What my mother did was she would design artificial flowers and then my father would take her designs and go around the wholesale stores and businesses around the garment district, just trying to sell her artificial flowers. And it took a while, but it took about seven years for them to establish a business. And then we ended up moving to Bayside Queens. I know you went to Bayside High School. Yes, yes, yes. And we were right nearby. That was my zone high school. You were like to George Jefferson. You were moving on out. Well, I think it's the story of the American dream. I know that so many immigrant families have come to this country, to the city and did exactly what we did. We had parents who worked hard, but also stressed education for us. And I think that's kind of the story of the American dream. When do you believe they felt as though, okay, we can do this, that we can have this small business? Cause you stayed at seven years. So I assume the first one or two years were extremely challenging. Absolutely. They didn't speak English very well. But I think they just never had any doubt that they were gonna make it because I think they had no choice. They left their home country. They were both well educated, but here they were. My dad was a salesman basically, door-to-door salesman. And my mother was just following whatever skills she had to try to make a living for our family. So I think it did take probably about four years, four, five years. But when you have limited expenses, living in a one bedroom with one bathroom and your maternal grandmother basically doing childcare for you, I think they were able to take that risk. Well. Today is about Promise Made. Promise is kept. Intro 116 requires the commission of Small Business Services to create a one-stop-shop NYC business fortune. This is something I talked about often. We send our small businesses and business operators around to too many different locations just to get a business open and operated. When I signed a bill of creating a portal where we can go to one location to make it easier for businesses, that must have really resonated with you. I think that for every small business trying to start a business here in New York City, there are a lot of regulatory challenges. And I think what this small business portal, the one-stop-shop portal will do for so many businesses is help cut through that bureaucratic red tape to get businesses up and running much sooner. And the fact that we emphasize under your leadership language access, I think that's also critical in that not only are we getting the information out, we're getting it out in the language that's needed for immigrant small business owners in particular to be able to take advantage of this portal. And I think about you stating that your parents did not speak fluent English. So many of our small businesses, English is a major barrier when you have to go inside an agency and get answers to your question. Yes, it is. Luckily, by law, we have the 10 languages that are provided to our constituents. But at SBS, we've gone further and have translated up to 17 materials and up to 17 languages. We know that without language access, you could have the greatest program, but many of the underserved and non-English language speakers would be shut out from those services. So a lot of what we've done with the budgetary support you've given us on outreach in particular is go meet the small business owners in their communities and meet them where they are in the language that'll make it accessible for them. What would I tell the person who rolls their eyes and say, oh, here we go again, one portal, one stop shop. We've heard that before. What's different? I think what's different is the commitment of the entire administration. So I think that if you had just one agency trying to do this, it ends up a lot of times hitting similar barriers when you end up having to have other agencies coordinating with you. So here with Office of Technology and Innovation being strong partners with SPS and having the cooperation because it came from the top, it's you said to all the agencies, we need to work together to make this happen. So I think that's the difference is the interagency cooperation that's happening at all levels. When we came in, we wanted to do some things that were substantial and visible. Tell me about the study we did with the 118 different rules and regulations and how important that was. I think what people underestimate is when you made this announcement just on day four of the administration about really taking a close look at every violation that is imposed on small businesses, what people don't understand is the message that went out to the business community that we're going to be different. We're going to be a city of yes. We're going to be a city of possibilities. And that exercise while very demanding was something that we got a lot of input from business owners. We got a lot of input from other agency heads. And so when Deputy Mayor Torres Springer and I were co-chairing this working very closely with the Chief Efficiency Office of Melanie LaRocca, we were able to study the top 25 violations that each regulatory agency imposed fines on. And we were able to say, look, of those, in a very short period of time, of those, we said 30 violations can be eliminated from the books altogether. 49, we can reduce the fines. They don't have to be that expensive. Then the last 39, we said, why don't we give people the opportunity to cure or to have a warning and really focus on education first rather than punishing people in the first time. Love it, love it. Let's get stuff done. That is really getting stuff done. And what's more exciting is the Small Business Advisory Commission you put into the blueprint initiative. That met for the first time last month and you came out there and you saw, these were real small business owners representing all five boroughs, the diversity of industry, the diversity of how many years they've been in business and those people are going to carry on this work so that by June of 2023, you said in the executive order, we are going to publish a report that's gonna do further studies on all the violations and they really are working hard at it. Every dollar we take away from a fine is a dollar we put back into the business that allows a business to hire people, to pay into our tax pool and move people into a middle class living. So it was a significant moment for us, early in the administration, our dedication. And it's just, you know, the role you played and the deputy mayor played was crucial. I want you to talk a bit about immigrant businesses. When COVID shut down our city, I noticed that many of our immigrant businesses remained open and they will continue to provide services to the city. What is your observation of that? One of the best parts of this job is that I get to go out to all the neighborhoods throughout the five boroughs and I get to walk the commercial corridors with city council members, with our bid and merchant association and CBO partners. And we get to actually talk to all the businesses that persevered through COVID. And what was just amazing to see was how many businesses actually started during COVID and most of them were opened by immigrant families. And as you said, the immigrant mentality, the immigrant spirit is alive and well in New York City. They don't have much of a choice. When they came to this country, they couldn't go find a corporate job, but they still have to feed their family. And so when you go in there and you see the Haitian Bakery and Jamaica Queens that started during the pandemic now thriving, it makes you very hopeful that the city is coming back and we're gonna come back stronger than ever before. It's so true. And although we experienced a real crisis through COVID-19 and many businesses were devastated what businesses did you see open and how were they expanded in services? Well, the good news is that we've recovered 820,000 of the 946,000 jobs that we've lost during the pandemic. We see recovery in almost all the sectors, in particular technology, healthcare. We also see a recovery in finance industry. But what people don't see is how many non-storefront businesses are coming back because they gotten the message that this is a city that is open for business, all businesses. When you talk about making New York City the e-sports capital of the world and the life sciences capital of the world, people have been listening. And you and I, we were able to celebrate Jim Beam Santori moving the headquarters from Chicago to New York and bringing hundreds of jobs to New York City. And those are just some examples of why people realize that New York City will always be the business capital of the world. And it's so important. Sometimes we don't see the connectivity on how all of these pieces come together. When we had 56 million tourists visit here those 56 million tourists is going to, they are going to go and attend a restaurant. They're going to buy a product off the street. So making our city safe for tourism allows tourists to visit our small businesses and allow our small businesses to pay taxes that we could ensure that we get the police personnel and the other city agencies to function. So there's a real ecosystem that is connected to how we coordinate running this city. There was something that I noticed during COVID and that was particularly at our Asian business in general but specifically our Chinese businesses. Some of the negative energy that came from Washington DC really caused our Chinese businesses to be targeted. What are we doing to support some of those businesses? You're absolutely right. The fear in the Asian American community in particular during the pandemic was real. The hate crimes against Asian Americans spiked. People were afraid to leave their homes especially our seniors who oftentimes during the day frequent the neighborhood shops, the coffee shops, the bakeries and they were afraid to come out. One of the things that we did to address all of that was to get the various Asian American organizations together in a room by creating the Asian American Small Business Task Force and it brought together more than 40 organizations to talk to each other and share strategies because in Chinatown one of the things, for example, that they decided to do was start a community patrol to help walk these seniors to other businesses that they would often frequent and then by having that shared experience and talking about that experience other communities, Asian American populated communities could take the same idea and also adapt it. We know that the Asian American businesses were hit particularly hard and there's been a lot of efforts to make sure that people have to understand that Asian Americans are American and one of the things that you did by putting in for next year, New York City Public Schools having to teach Asian American history, that's historic and that means a lot to the community but more importantly, I think it's every indication that we have to educate other communities that we are New Yorkers, we're American and the leadership has to come from the top not from what was happening in DC in the past previous four years. Our politics are local and it's important to focus on those local issues that's so important. As we conclude, what surprised you about the job was the most exciting part of the job and what do you see the vision for the future as the commissioner of small business services? What surprised me most was how dedicated the small business services staff members all are from top to bottom. When you see what those people at SBS did during the pandemic, it's an incredible story. In one day basically in 24 hours, they were able to pivot to going online and they had members of the staff deliver laptops to every employee and then they were able to be online, helping small businesses, understand all the COVID regulation changes, understand all the grants and loan programs that were coming out from the federal government real time. I mean, the dedication and the stress levels that they had to endure is something that has been really inspiring for me. During one of our commissioner early meetings, you said to us, if things are easy, anyone could do this job. And you said, all of you here, you all wanted this job and you chose us because you thought we would be in the best position to actually get stuff done. And so I look around to my other fellow commissioners like commissioner Castro of Moya and having been undocumented, but now being the immigrant affairs commissioner. And it's amazing to be able to share that lived experience and be able to apply it to our day to day policy work. And the best thing about this job again is really getting out into the community and having business owners tell us that they didn't know that New York City could do these services. So we've been in communities where they said we had never really been and they had never really been able to take advantage of our services. We went to Little Pakistan in Brooklyn. We went to a Bangladeshi community in Jamaica, Queens. The Sri Lankan community in Staten Island. So we've been all around. And when you see the people's eyes light up whenever we can help them with some service, I think that's just been the most rewarding part of this. No, well, and well said. And when you look at the lineup of commissioners, what I find very fascinating is each one of you have your own version of the American dream to watch your mom and dad go door to door sell plastic flowers. And now you're in charge of helping those other small businesses. And even Commissioner Castro over at Mayor's Office of Immigrant Affairs to be a dreamer. And now he's making sure other people are able to obtain their dreams. That's the American story and that's the American dream. And the only way we could accomplish that is to be committed to getting stuff done. So thank you for being on the Get Stuff Done podcast. I look forward to seeing you continue to grow our small businesses in this city. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. It's an honor to be on the Get Stuff Done cast. And to anyone, foreign or domestic, there is only one country on the globe with dream is attached to its name. There's no German dream, no Polish dream, no French dream, but damn it, that is an American dream. And this dream is alive and it is well every day. And this is the information I wanted to share today. I hope to see you for another episode of Get Stuff Done Cast.