 Think Tech Hawaii. Civil engagement lives here. Aloha and welcome to Business in Hawaii with Reg Baker. We broadcast live about two o'clock every Thursday afternoon. Sometimes we run a little late but things can't always work on time. And we promote businesses that are successful in Hawaii and those organizations that help support those businesses and make them successful. We broadcast, as I mentioned, every week on Thursdays. And we do this from the Pioneer Plaza in downtown Hololulu in the high tech studios of Think Tech Hawaii. Today we have a guest all the way from the Big Island from Hilo, Kathy Wiltsi, who's a state director of the Small Business Development Center. She runs everything statewide from Hilo but has come all the way over to Hololulu for today's show. So we appreciate Kathy for making that trip. Thank you very much. Welcome to the show. Thank you. Now SBDC has been in Hawaii for quite a while, right? Yes. The SBDC has been a program of the University of Hawaii at Hilo for 28 years now. 28 years. All right. And how long have you been involved with SBDC? A little over six years now. Six years. All right. And how did you end up coming and becoming involved as a state director for SBDC? Well, I came from the Virginia Small Business Development Center. Oh, so you got some history there. I have quite a bit. Good. So in that position, as the associate director, the job opened up. I threw my hat in the ring and next thing I knew, I was on a plane to Hawaii. Very good. Well, welcome to Hawaii. Thank you. Is it everything that you expected it to be? And more. Oh, good. I love it. Good. Yeah. Hilo is a little different than Hololulu. It's a little bit more laid back. A little bit. Yeah. I used to spend a lot of time in Hilo. Yes. You know, I was an auditor for the Bank of Hawaii. We used to go over and audit the branches at the Bank of Hawaii over there. Right. So it was a lot of fun. So tell me, give us the background. How did Hilo end up becoming the state office for all of the SBDCs statewide? How did that happen? Actually, that was a decision when the program was brought into Hawaii. Senator Inouye determined he was concerned that since it's a statewide program, if it was located only in Oahu, the neighbor islands wouldn't get a very good representation. Right. Yeah, they wouldn't get the attention that they'd deserve. Exactly. So we now have actually two offices on the big island. One in Hilo, one in Kona. We have an office here. The main office in Oahu here is out with HGDC at the Minoa Innovation Center. Right. And then there's also a satellite office on the west side. Good. That helps out the small businesses out there. I've heard that they've got a town forming out there in the west side somewhere. Actually, it's gotten really big. They've been working on that for a while. So that's good. They deserve to have their own representation out there. And then you mentioned also there's one on Kauai. Yes. Kauai and Maui. And Maui. Very good. So you've got the entire state covered. We do. And tell me a little bit about SBDC. What does it do? On all these different islands that you've got offices, what is it the services they provide? The primary service is actually one-on-one business consulting. We work both with people forming businesses, as well as with existing businesses across the state. And it's any small business, which of course, as you know, most businesses in Hawaii are small business by the standards of the SBA. They are. By some estimates, it can be as high as 97, 98 percent. Yes. And what's also important, and maybe even more important, is the fact that they also provide at least half of the employment in the state. That's where a lot of employment generates is from that small business community. So you really need to have a healthy small business community to keep people employed. Absolutely. We tend to think of it as if you aren't going to have your own small business, you may end up working for one. So it's good to know as much as you can about how small businesses operate in the state. Exactly. And a lot of people, I guess, if you work there, you can appreciate this more. But when you work for a small business, and there's only a handful of you there, everybody kind of pitches in and works together, and the more you know, the more successful it's going to be. Yes, absolutely. Small business owners as well as employees tend to wear a lot of hats. Right. And so when you do your training out at the centers, do you train just the owners, or can you also train the employees so they can get more up to speed with that? How does that work? The training classes are totally open. Generally, the one-on-one counseling is strictly for like, upper management, the owners, and maybe a general manager, something like that. But the training sessions are open. Anyone can attend, and we often have employers who invite several of their employees to come to some of the training classes. That's great. You know, is there a charge for some of this? There's a nominal charge for the training, mostly $10 to $25, and we don't go over that. That barely covers the cost. Exactly. That's the only reason we do it, and to make sure that people feel like they have a reason to show up for the class. That's right. Well, you get a little skin in the game. It makes you a little bit more serious about taking advantage of it. Exactly. No, that's good. You've got, who teaches these courses? I mean, I know you've got counselors on staff, and they do a lot of the one-on-one, and they kind of hold everything together, but I guess they do some training, but you also have other people do training too? That's correct. Many of the basic classes, like how to start a small business in Hawaii, fill in your county, those are taught generally by staff. There are many specialty classes that we give on social media, for example, financing your business. Some of those we bring in other specialists to help out. That's always some of the more popular courses, at least from my experience of working with the Chamber of Commerce and the SBA, is that usually they like to know how to get some money so they can do their business or grow their business or buy a business, and then they also want to know how to get more sales and how to do their marketing. And in today's environment, the e-commerce is a big piece of that. Absolutely. You have those two components, and you've got a majority of the interest of the SMB, the small and mid-sized business community out there. Absolutely. How often are these classes scheduled? Well, last year we did, for example, across the whole state, 90 classes. So they can come pretty often. Of course, it's across the state, so an individual center. They have at least monthly training on various subjects. Like I said, the basic ones, they repeat so that if people don't have a chance to come in a particular one, there'll be another one coming up. Now you have a website, right? We do. And what is that website address? It's www.HawaiiSBDC. H-I-S-B-D-C. I'm sorry. H-I. H-I. S-B-D-C.org. S-B-D-C.org. Right. And so that'll get you to the main home website. And in each island, we'll have a little bit of individual centers. That's correct. Okay. And if anybody out there wanted to see the calendar, there would be calendars on there out for a few months or so. Right. And then they would list out all the different courses that's being offered. Right. So they do show, and you can even check if you happen to be traveling around the state. You can go to a class anywhere and you're not restricted to your home location. Okay. Now I'm going to wear my CPA hat for a minute. So if I wanted to take a course on how to raise capital and I looked on the calendar and I saw that there was a course being offered over on Kauai. I could actually fly to Kauai, take the course and it'd be a business deduction. There you go. It would. All right. Well, we'll have to see if we can take advantage of that. Exactly. You'll have to be checking out that schedule. Very good. So for anybody who's looking to get more information on any of the centers or the calendar, they just got to go to www.hi. And it is sbdc.org. Correct. And that'll give you all the information that's going to drive from there. But there's other information on there too, right? That's what I was just going to mention. In addition to the basic information of how to get in touch with us and what classes we offer, it's actually how you would request counseling, individual counseling. You'll see quite a bit of history and other links to other important things for small business. There's a disaster recovery plan on there. A lot of the things that we find are useful for small businesses are there. Well, it sounds like a site you'd want to go to and explore a little bit and see what's there. I was going to say, it definitely has some interesting items on it. Another very interesting area is the success stories. So each island also posts, we try to do at least two per counselor per year for each of the centers, each of the counselors. So there's quite a few success stories on there about businesses who have worked with us and have been very satisfied with the results. Let me hold that thought for a second. What I'd like to do is take a quick break and then come back and then maybe we can talk a little bit about the success stories and studies on how things can be done and worked through. Snapshots. Snapshots. But then I want to get into the details of how successful SBDC has been this past year and to just demonstrate how much value there is there. But this is business in Hawaii with Reg Baker. We're here talking with SBDC. That's the Small Business Development Corporation. I'm sorry, Center in Hawaii. We're going to take a short 60-second break and we'll be right back. Research says reading from birth accelerates the baby's brain development. You're doing that now? Oh, yeah. This is the starting line. Posh. Plug 15 minutes. Every child, every parent, every day. Welcome back. This is business in Hawaii with Reg Baker. We're here this week talking with the Small Business Development Center of Hawaii. We've got Kathy Wisley here. Wilty. Wilty. Wilty. Wilty. I'm sorry. I said it right the first time. You did. I got tongue tied. Tell us a little bit about the sex stories that you were just getting into. Just little snapshots of some of the different things that SBDC has done in the past. Can you share some of those stories with us? Well, it's a very wide range of types of businesses because of the business makeup here and who we tend to help a lot. You'll see many restaurants and how they've been able to expand. Recently, we've been working with quite a few breweries. Now, that sounds like fun. That's one of our favorites. And a special note is that last year, Garrett Marrero, who is Maui Brewing Company, was the national winner for the Small Business Person of the Year. Which is one of the annual awards that the Small Business Administration does, right? It's a big one. He went to Washington, D.C. for it. It was really great. Another honor for Hawaii. We've actually had several of those over the years. So it's done really well. And it sounds like your centers had a lot to do with that then. Yes. We've been working with Maui Brewing for many years from when he first built his new facility. We've assisted him in getting various types of financing. We actually did a feasibility study for him that enabled him to do quite a bit of the financing for the new. So this is a good example. You come to SBDC and you become a national award-winning company. That's right. That's good. And most small businesses would aspire to be like Garrett Marrero. Yeah, very good. He's a great success story. You mentioned feasibility study. Sometimes people like to have a feasibility study of a company or a product that they're thinking about doing. Is that something that you guys are involved in as well? We do feasibility studies. It's an offering that we make for a reasonable charge. Often they're required by agencies, federal agencies, like the USDA. And in order for them to make a loan, they need to make sure that the business is viable. Now, a lot of people don't realize it, but the USDA actually provides a lot of funding for startup companies. Quite a bit. Quite a bit. So they account for a big portion of, especially when we have done a feasibility study, that's going to be one of the biggest impacts you'll see in what we count as our capital infusion. Well, as a matter of fact, you've got a couple slides or pictures we're going to show up on the screen. But page one talks a little bit about some of the things you've done this past year. That's right. And so it's on the screen. And can you just walk us through this little bit? Sure. These are all the kind of the key highlights of some of the activities from last year. And as you can see, the client served was 1,302 clients across the state just in calendar year 2017. And to become a client, you actually have had one-on-one counseling with any of our counselors. See, that's an impressive number. That's 100 a month, over 100 a month. And that's a lot of work. It's a lot of work. And primarily out of five major offices. The jobs created, again, across the state, we're very proud of, 373 jobs. And when we claim them as jobs created for the SPDC, we actually get a form signed by the client that affirms that it was the SPDC that allowed them to give us these impact numbers. So business starts, capital infusion, their sales numbers, which aren't really reflected here. But that's all affirmed by the client. But there's also a multiplier effect to this, too. I mean, there could be, you know, 373 jobs created and a lot of new sales. But then all of a sudden, there's other companies that are involved in helping the business grow and get bigger. And so there's a multiplier effect that spreads out through the economy. So it's really a very big positive number. Yeah. If you think about, and we don't have time to go into it today, but if you think about the tax revenues for the state, for example, just on the jobs created, that's very significant. The GET taxes on the successful businesses. Yeah. But we all know, at least during this time of the year, how much the taxes add up to. Yes. We're all going through that right now. Absolutely. That's also a big number. Mm-hmm. And then the capital infusion, as I referred to a little bit earlier, we had over $29,415,734 over last year that was attributed to help by the SBDC. And that's a huge number when you think about that. It is. Financing, owner investment, a lot of grants. Right. All the sources that that money comes in to help support that business of getting it going. Exactly. Yeah. And again, that's key for keeping the economy healthy. That's $30 million almost. Right. And that's a good round number too. Mm-hmm. I mean, it's very healthy. And I guess I can see on here you've done 90 workshops. And that's another multiplier. Right. You do 90 business workshops, but there's going to be at least 10 or 20 people in each workshop. Oh, yes. So well over 1,000 people. Yeah. I was going to say, on page two, just real quickly, I won't go into the details here, but for the training events, there were 90 last year and over 1,300 attendees at those various workshops. So that's a significant number of people who are getting to learn more about how to run a business. Right. Or how to run the business better. Exactly. Be more productive, more efficient, more profitable. And these are all very good components. Mm-hmm. And SBDC is very active in supporting this. Mm-hmm. And so this is a great service that is being provided. And you can also see that the trends have been, we've been steadily able to increase our impact and the value to the economy here in Hawaii. Right. So. Now, is this, how is all of, I mean, this is all great stuff and this is all great benefit to the small business community and to the employees that work for small businesses. How is all this paid for? Is this coming out of tax dollars or is this, what's the funding for SBDC? Indirectly, we're funded federally through the United States Small Business Administration and also by the state of Hawaii through a line item that goes through our host University of Hawaii at Hilo to support our activities. So that's how we can offer the council. One-on-one counseling is all free of charge. Yeah. And that's time consuming. I mean, that takes some time. And, you know, these people that do the counseling are pretty bright people. They can be very helpful. Well, and they, a lot of their job is also conducting research on the particular interests or activities or needs of the client. So they do a lot of research on behalf. That's a very good point. It's not just a one-on-one conversation. There's a lot of prep time that's necessary to get to that point. Absolutely. Yeah. And we also have, not sure if you even are aware of this, but the Hawaii Business Research Library is on Maui and we actually do, we take requests from clients and we look up information that is like Internet information for example or studies, services to give people examples of business plans, industry ratios, things that help them become more successful in their given industry. If there was an existing business that was out there and they wanted to do some industry comparisons, how would they request that information? Do they go online and go through that route or do they reach out to somebody? They would reach out to their local center or any of our centers and ask to set up an appointment to speak to a counselor. Then generally the counselor will go deeper into what the need is and then we request it from our library. Very good. We intend to and probably later this year will have an online request form for that. Very good. Well it sounds like you had a great 2017. We did indeed. And the trends are getting better. What are you expecting for 2018? That's going to continue? It's going to continue. Now some of the changes that are coming, it's too early to tell, but it looks like we're heading into a year that's going to have some pretty positive growth for the small business or all business in general. So are you guys ready for this? It might get busy. We try to keep up and that's when we, if we find subjects that are of particular interest, that's why we supplement our services with the training classes so that we can get to more people in a quicker amount of time more efficiently. Well that's great. This is great information and I'm sure there's going to be a lot of information also on the website. And that website is, one more time. It's H-I-S-B-D-C dot org. Very good. And you go on there and you can poke around there's going to be all kinds of information on there and links to other places too that has other information. Exactly. That's excellent. I really appreciate your time coming over here and look forward to an update maybe in six months and see how the year is going and if we're hitting the numbers. That sounds good. This is very impressive. Well and I get over here a lot as you can imagine with the statewide group. I do quite a bit of traveling. Very good. Well, Kathy, thank you again. No problem. This is Business in Hawaii with Reg Baker. We were here today talking with H-I-S-B-D-C and the State Director, Kathy Wiltsi. We appreciate her coming all the way over from Hilo to visit with us. Have a safe trip home and we'll see everybody next week. Aloha.