 What's happening it's Shane here and in today's video we are going to be talking about the top five grants to start a business in 2021. All right so this has been a highly highly requested video. Back in 2019 I made a couple videos about my experience writing grants because I used to work for a 501c3 non-profit organization and I helped them apply for a bunch of different grants so I shared my experience and both of the videos absolutely blew up. They both got over 100,000 views. I had no idea that these videos were going to blow up so much and I had so many different requests to make more videos on the topic but the truth is I pretty much said it all in those videos but when 2020 happened with all of the stimulus checks and all the grants etc from the government I decided it was time to basically redo those videos and make even better versions for the current times. Definitely one of the most requested topics though I've literally gotten you know email after email. One guy joined my patreon and he basically told me he wanted to pay me to personally coach him how to write grants and I told him that I'm just way too busy with the youtube channel and my normal job and so I wouldn't be able to do that but hopefully this makes up for it. I am basically going to spill all the beans in this video I'm going to tell you all of the best possible stuff that you can do in order to get grants in 2021. All right so jumping right into it right after you gently tap that like button let's aim for 5,000 likes on this video let's see if we can do it and then also hit the subscribe button and ring the notification bell. Only about 18 percent of you or so are subscribed and out of those 18 percent only about 8 percent of you actually hit the notification bell and turn on all notifications so I think we can do better we pump those numbers up those are some rookie numbers but I actually I seriously appreciate it so if you could do that I would love that thank you so much so number one on the list my whole philosophy when it comes to grants and all this sort of thing is you want to start local first right so you want to start small and then start thinking big and most people do the opposite they go online and they start applying for all these like random grants that are like national or like international grants and the truth is like so many people are applying for those and so your chances are very low but if you start local your chances are going to be much higher because not that many people are going to end up applying now the programs that usually do these grants are either going to be city or county programs and basically these offices are set up to make sure that the local community economically flourishes and they're basically designed this way to encourage people who might not have started a business or maybe they wouldn't have even been productive at all to start one now the whole thing about these local sites is there's first of all there's like so many different ones and second of all they're going to be different depending on where you live what county you live in the city you live in etc right so unfortunately there's no like national or international site you can go to in order to find this out the best way is actually just to google it and the best way to do this is to either type in your state and then the words small business development center or you just basically type in the name of your city and then again small business development center and then you would want to go on the website and look to see what resources they have on there you know some websites are going to be designed better than others and if the website isn't helpful go ahead and call the number on the website and they should be able to help you if you explain your situation to them and they will be able to provide you with all the way from obviously grants sometimes they'll be able to give you loans that have very low interest rates and they'll also be able to help you with other things like setting up your business consulting services doing accounting for tax purposes and then also marketing now again you want to start local try to find ones that are the closest to your city as possible and then branch out so after you start local maybe do the county after you do the county then try the state now after you've done this the next step number two is going to be for you to call your elected officials and the reason for this is because congressmen and congresswomen have people that are dedicated to answer questions from people and the way you can find these lines these dedicated lines is to go to votesmart.org now people who are elected as congressmen and congresswomen likely want to get reelected so i'm just being honest here that is the main reason that they set up these lines but basically you want to describe your situation of them always always always be very nice to people be very cordial you know if they don't know the answer tell them hey is there any way you could maybe ask somebody else that might know the answer be as nice as possible i i can't believe i even have to say this obviously don't be a Karen on the phone you know they are taking time out of their day to help you but explain your situation to them and a lot of the time that they will be able to set you up with not only state funding but sometimes also national or federal funding if they are able to directly set you up they might lead you in the right direction they might have access to phone numbers and emails that would be people who actually know about this stuff or are able to help you directly i know a guy who knows a guy who knows another guy the thing about the government is it offers a ton of grants but is super super super disorganized and it's not efficient at all so you have to go out there and actually find these things right unfortunately they're not organized they don't just you know give you a list or anything like that or if they do give you a list it's usually very unorganized and incomplete so there's lots of opportunities for grants that never even get applied for resource number three is for you to actually go to your local library libraries are an extremely underutilized resource now sometimes the librarians themselves may be able to help you out with this if you you know set up an appointment go in there again be very nice to them be very cordial and explain your situation to them and ask them if they know of anything that they can do to help you out however even if the librarian themselves can't help you out a lot of the time they'll be able to point you towards somebody who can and if they can't do that at the very least libraries oftentimes will have access to databases that are basically subscription services that cost sometimes tens of thousands of dollars per year and these databases are updated and that's why they cost money right because you know you have to have people in order to update these databases in real time and do all that research and they basically will show you grants from different non-profit and private organizations that are currently being offered and these databases are specifically good at finding the really rare ones the ones that are usually offered in you know cities counties or states now once you've exhausted all of your local resources the next step is for you to start looking at dedicated programs these are going to be state and national programs that a ton of people know about so there's definitely going to be a lot more competition for these grants but at the same time there's also going to be a lot more of them so a great website for instance is career one-stop.org and they will give you $250,000 potentially for you to train yourself and or your employees and this is usually for fundamental super important stuff like marketing sales customer service etc another really good one is nist.gov and basically what they do is they will audit your business for free in order for you to increase your sales and this is essentially free consulting that would usually cost if you hired a private company something like five to ten thousand dollars for like a week and all of this is completely free and there are a ton of different government programs like this like i said um again it's easier to get the grants from the local ones but um there's a lot more grants from the government programs all right number five on this list is going to be for you to check out i'm not even going to say the word but cov id related grants and the reason i'm not saying the word is because youtube's going to demonetize the video if i do why why not the situation related grants loans and programs now this is obviously stuff like the stimulus checks uh also ppp loans you know when the stimulus check thing was happening i think i made a total of three videos uh there were channels that literally made hundreds of videos they would make like two or three videos a day on the stimulus checks i don't know how they did it because there's really not that many updates for like months at a time but these channels grew from nothing to like hundreds of thousands of subscribers just talking about stimulus checks but there's also the ppp loans this is the small business loans that you basically either don't have to pay back at all or if you do have to pay them back they don't have any interest there's the shuttered venue operations grant or svog and that is basically for types of businesses who were operational but because of the situation in the world they had to close down so for instance if your business was making about a million dollars a year just to make things simple and you had to close it down you may be eligible for up to 45 percent of what you would have made so in this case that would be 450 thousand dollars and that is a grant not alone so you wouldn't have to pay that back right so there is literally dozens of different c o v i d related grants and loans and you know services definitely check those out online again google is going to be your friend here you literally just have to type it in and i'm actually going to make a second video where i kind of delve a little more deeply into those specific grants so definitely stay tuned for that but overall this video i'm going to go ahead and end it here hope you enjoyed let me know if you have any comments thoughts etc down in the description below any grants that you've applied for and uh check out my other videos right here i made them just for you go ahead gently tap the like button hit that subscribe button ring the notification bell and comment down below any thoughts comments criticisms etc and i will see you next time