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- So I actually came to the Small Business Development
Center, and I just asked them and said,
the day I actually got laid off I went up there and I said,
this is my problem, and I don't know where to go.
And I have great ideas, I just don't
know what to do with them.
And I talked to Mike and Mike was
able to give me some great ideas,
and within a matter of about a month and a half,
I have my business up and running.
So I've been here for about a year and a half now.
I opened up in July of last year,
and business is doing great.
I've been on the block ever since
and things are going great for me.
- My name is Mike Young, and I'm the director
of the Small Business Development Center
serving the Cache Valley area.
The Small Business Development Center is part of a state
and nationwide network of small business development centers,
and we are designed to be a support
resource to the small business community.
The Small Business Development Center here in Cache Valley
receives its support from a number of different sources,
including, federally, from the SBA,
from the Governor's Office of Economic Development
here in Utah, as well as from Utah State University.
And our center here is part of Utah State.
MIKE YOUNG: As part of our free one-on-one management
consulting services offered, we can provide business planning,
we can help people create financial projections,
we can help you create and develop a marketing strategy,
we can help people who are trying to find capital
to grow their business, as well as provide many other services
to help your business succeed.
- My name is Benjamin Rasmussen.
I am a business analyst at the Small Business Development
Center at Utah State, and our Market Research Program
has received a lot of positive reaction from our clients.
For example, we had one software developer in the Valley
receive a list of distributors or businesses
that she could potentially work with in order
to distribute or sell her product more easily.
And that has been a success for her.
She's had a lot of contacts, through which she
has grown her business.
- Hi.
I'm Mark Lunt.
I operate Catalyst Property Management and the Island
Market.
I was a mailman, didn't know I was an entrepreneur.
And ended up picking up a bunch of rental properties
and contacted the Small Business Development Center,
and worked with them to help create a business plan.
And I've worked with them for several things, financing,
some social media ideas.
And, really, it's been a partnership that's
lasted the last eight years.
I feel like one of the areas that the Small Business
Development Center has assisted me is sometimes
it's so hard to know who to turn to to help work
through different issues or get advice on different issues.
And knowing that they're just an email or a phone call away
and that they have access to so many different resources,
has really been valuable.
Sometimes that journey of 1,000 steps
starts with the first step, but when
you don't know what direction to take for that first step,
that's where the SBDC has been so helpful for me.
- My name is Andrea Barlow.
I work here at the Small Business Development Center,
I'm a part of USU.
I'm the team lead for the Market Research Division here.
And what we focus on, we have clients come in
and they ask us questions, and the market research end,
we try and focus on finding out if there's really
a market for whatever the product is
or the idea that this person is coming up with.
- When our company first began, I
contacted the Small Business Development Center
because I really didn't have a business background.
And so one of the first things that they provided
was an incredible pro forma or business plan
with all the accounting details that I needed to figure out
what kind of money I was going to need to generate in order
to keep my staff afloat and my company going.
And that was very, very, very helpful and instructive,
and I had several personal sessions of several hours
with the associate that helped me at that time.
Following that, the next big piece
that was really important for us in our early years
was the sales piece because I'd never done sales.
The associate, I remember him saying to me that,
what you really need to figure out with customers
is how to make them look good to their boss,
and what kind of pain you can remove from their daily life.
- Before we started construction,
we reached out to Small Business Development Center.
And we wanted to make sure that what we were building
was going to be exactly what the students wanted.
Being able to get that feedback, not only helps us build what
we should, it also helped us secure funding because then
the bank can see, hey, here's the demand
and here's why we're building what we're building.
- The Small Business Development Center provides free one-on-one
management consulting, as well as a wide variety of other
services to help you be successful as a small business
owner.
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