Need a clear path through federal rules and growth capital. Bryan Eisenberg’s latest Rock Solid podcast delivers one. He interviews Lisa Shimkat and Chip Bishop from the Small Business Administration. They run the SBA’s 68 district offices and the agency’s Office of Advocacy. They explain where to find working-capital loans, export help, and a direct phone line that trims red tape.
Bryan guides a steady conversation. Lisa Shimkat, Associate Administrator Field Operations, outlines the 7 (a), 504, and Working Capital Pilot programs and shares real numbers owners secure today. Chip Bishop, Deputy Chief Counsel, shows how the Red Tape Hotline and the Regulatory Flexibility Act remove costly filings. Both guests describe why Round Rock’s schools, chamber, and city offices support small firms together.
Watch the episode, note your local district office at SBA.gov, and save the hotline: RedTape.gov. Share the link with any owner who thinks the SBA only backs loans. You will help them claim resources already set aside for their next hire, machine, or export order.
Federal support works best when owners ask. This interview shows the exact place to start. Press play, take action, and keep your business moving forward.
Transcript:
Welcome to Rock Solid, the Round Rock Business Leaders Podcast. Join your host, Bryan Eisenberg, as he explores the journeys of entrepreneurs and companies across Round Rock, Texas. From startups and nonprofits to large organizations, each guest shares their passion for doing business in this thriving community. Let’s dive in.
Opening
Bryan Eisenberg (Host):
Hi everybody, it’s Bryan Eisenberg and welcome to a special episode of Rock Solid. We’re joined by two special guests who are in town this week: Lisa Shimkat, who we’ll get to—what her role is with the SBA in a moment—and Chip Bishop as well from the SBA and his role in a minute. I’ll kind of let them each describe what they do.
Introductions & Roles
Bryan:
At a very high level, you are in charge of all the operations for all the field offices—and there’s a lot of them—and the regional offices as well. So can you tell us a little bit about what your role is?
Lisa Shimkat (SBA):
Absolutely. First, thank you very much for allowing us to take part in this. My role is: we have 68 district offices across the United States and the territories, and I am in charge of all of those offices—really helping drive what our mission is to make sure that our outward-facing arm of the Small Business Administration is really getting out there to the clients, getting out there to the customers, and helping find what businesses need.
The other part of my role is with the Office of Manufacturing and Trade, so we are helping manufacturers figure out new markets, where can we export, how can we find some more companies for onshoring, and really trying to figure out what are the pain points so that we can help them succeed and move forward.
Bryan:
Awesome. And Chip?
Chip Bishop (SBA Office of Advocacy):
Yeah, I’m glad that Lisa mentioned pain points, and thank you again for having us. My role is to focus on the deregulatory agenda of the federal government. We are housed within the Small Business Administration, but we actually cover every agency across the federal government. So the Regulatory Flexibility Act of 1980 established our office to hold accountable agencies for—any time they regulate—analyzing the impact on small businesses of the rules they’re issuing.
So we work with small businesses and small governments, small entities across the country to make sure that their voice is heard in the federal regulatory process because they’re often not big enough or don’t know how to engage on their own. So we are their advocate, and that’s where the Office of Advocacy comes from.
Bryan:
Yeah, Office of Advocacy. I definitely want to dive into a lot more of that because I think, you know, when we think about SBA most people think SBA loans—if they’ve heard of it, right? They probably don’t even know exactly what the SBA does or what kind of resources it may have if you want to be an entrepreneur. I’d love to kind of dive into that and then go deeper into the advocacy side because that’s the part I’m sure most people have no idea, and absolutely with so much going on today I’m sure that’s playing a very critical role in the rollout of new small businesses.
Lisa:
Absolutely. And we hear that a lot. You hate being the best-kept secret—you know, when you have great resources and great tools out there, especially for small businesses. So the first thing people ask, “Am I a small business? I have 50 employees or I have 10 million in sales.” It actually depends on what type of business you are. But we encourage everyone to reach out to their local district office. That’s the easiest thing: SBA.gov, find your local district office.
Then, when you talk about some of the products that we have, we have a lot of loan-guarantee programs. We have really fancy names for them. The first one is 7(a) and that is for the manufacturing; it can be for equipment. Then the 504—as I said, we’re not super creative sometimes—but the 504, where that one is used as a we call it a 50-40-10. You have a bank that will do 50 percent of it, we have a CDC (certified development company) that will do the 40 percent, and then we have 10 percent that the owner will do. So that’s usually used for buildings and such.
But we also have one that is really under-utilized right now that we’re finding manufacturers really could utilize: the Working Capital Pilot Program. And that—we’re seeing an average of about 1 million dollars that they’re securing as they’re looking to grow. You know, if you’re looking to grow and all of a sudden you need to really ramp up quickly because you’ve gotten that contract, that is really the way to go.
Other ways we help are to look for new markets. So there’s really a lot of diversification in the services that are available through the Small Business Administration. The best thing for a small-business owner to do is to step out and say, “You know what? What do you have for me?” I do want to mention too, we have resource partners at no cost that can help a business owner analyze: “What is my financial health? What markets should I look at? And what should I do tomorrow?” There are a lot of answers out there.
Round Rock Studio Spot
Narrator: Rock Solid is produced and recorded at Round Rock Studio, located right here in Round Rock. Our state-of-the-art studio is built for podcasters and creatives alike. We offer multiple professionally designed podcast sets, top-notch recording gear, and a full photography studio ready for any project. Whether you’re launching a new podcast or upgrading your existing one, we can help with multi-camera recording, editing, and everything you need for success. Record with us at Round Rock Studio—your local podcasting partner.
The Value of Small Business
Bryan:
You know, I find it fascinating, being an entrepreneur for the last 30 years, how many people think about the big giants, right? The Amazons, the Googles, the Microsofts, the Dells. Those are the obvious companies. But a strong economy is built on small businesses. We know that—the number of growing businesses, the people they hire, and all of that. Why is it such a struggle, I guess, for the average small-business owner to reach out and advocate for themselves, to tap into some of these resources?
Lisa:
You know, I’m going to answer that not only in my role but as a former business owner.
Bryan:
Yeah.
Lisa:
Because we just figured out—when you’re a small-business owner, you figure it out because you don’t feel like the government would have a resource for you. But there is a resource. So that’s where we see a lot of small-business owners just trying to figure it out on their own.
The other thing you mentioned was having a strong company, but I think that small businesses are the key to having a strong community, because they are the first ones that philanthropic local community advocates reach out to—to help with fund-raisers and such—and supporting those local small businesses is really critical to keeping that strong economy locally.
Bryan:
Yeah. I mean we we just brought in Round Rock Donuts, right?
Lisa:
Absolutely.
Bryan:
They have been here for 99 years. They’ll celebrate their hundredth.
Lisa:
Yeah, absolutely.
Bryan:
And they just—just like two years ago, I think—opened up their second shop.
Lisa:
Yep.
Small Firms, Big Impact
Chip:
I think that one thing about small businesses is that we’ve been to—what—22 states in the last two months, three months, and talked to hundreds of businesses, and they want to solve problems and they want to work in the field that they chose. And a lot of the time that’s their focus, and they don’t realize that there’s other avenues of support. They just say, “Look, I’m an innovator. I want to get this accomplished,” and they make it happen.
They don’t realize that there might be alternatives to take away those barriers, because if they take time to focus on those barriers, then their business isn’t going to grow, isn’t going to expand, and they focus on the thing that they’re good at.
When you come to the support element, 99 percent of manufacturers are actually small businesses on a per-firm basis, and when you look at a lot of the big companies that you mentioned, they contract out to small businesses to be the tip of the spear to innovate because they trust small businesses to find a unique solution and scale it and supply them.
It is a huge part of the ecosystem that we’ve heard over and over again as we toured the country—that if anyone has the impression that small businesses are not advanced, that is mostly entirely incorrect. They’re so advanced and they play such a huge role in moving the overall U.S. economy. Two-thirds of new jobs are starting in small businesses. So you see the big profit numbers and big GDP numbers of the big ones, but they would not attain those numbers without the ecosystem of the smalls.
Early Entrepreneurship Story
Bryan:
It’s—you know, I kind of say it the same way I’ve—you know, in the past I’ve lost 100 pounds, but how do you lose 100 pounds? One bite at a time. And it’s the same thing. It’s one small business at a time employing a few people, employing the kid. I mean, I know you got started in a bakery, right, when you were really young. How did that impact your worldview of what you do today?
Chip:
Well, I mean, I eat donuts still, like we all saw. No, I started—I got a start in a bakery because we went in and my dad made a joke. They told him how much we had to pay, and he’s like, “Can I leave my kid to work it off?” And they said, “Yeah, show up tomorrow at 4 a.m.” And I told my dad, “Let’s show up tomorrow at 4 a.m.” I was ten years old.
I was capable of producing things, and I went in and I ran their entire cookie manufacturing for one store location, and we had customers coming in just for those cookies. I learned that I can take my time and my effort and hone a craft, I can become really good at it, and I can put a smile on people’s faces and they come back for more. Then I graduated to brownies and then eventually the bagel machine.
That really taught me that if I can focus on something that adds value to other people, then I’m going to have a satisfying career, and that’s why I got into what I’m doing now: I work on cutting regulations for millions of small businesses. How cool is that—that I get to focus my time and my energy on rolling back impediments that people don’t—they don’t understand how a regulation works? And I just—I’m excited because I’m kind of weird and I do know how regulations work, and it excites me.
Bryan:
So, two questions for you. One, are you still baking?
Chip:
I do. I do still bake cookies.
Bryan:
I was just curious. But, more importantly, I mean, I know you have a background both as an economist and now as an attorney—doing, right, or the legal work of advocacy.
Chip:
Yeah, so this is a fun fact because the title is chief counsel, but that’s just like the title that they gave it. So I like to joke to my friends who are actual attorneys that I became chief counsel before they did and I don’t even have a law degree.
Bryan:
Terrific.
Chip:
But it’s called chief counsel because a lot of the work that we do is legal. Yes. And it’s a combination of legal writing and legal analysis with economic analysis, because the way that a regulation is made, an agency has to write and publish in the Code of Federal Regulations “thou shalt” or “thou shalt not” to all the businesses, and it has to be very meticulously crafted because there’s going to be people looking for loopholes. We want to refine behavior, but that—all of those words come with a cost.
Bryan:
Yeah.
Chip:
And we have to analyze what that is, and that’s where the Regulatory Flexibility Act, which established our office, came from. Congress looked around and said, “There are millions and millions of small businesses and stacks of—you know, maybe the only thing more than the number of small businesses, which is like 36 million, is probably the pages of the federal regulations.”
But they said small businesses can’t read all of these. So the agencies—the onus is on them to analyze the impact on small businesses, and we’re requiring it. Then they came out with the Regulatory Fairness Act, the SBREFA, and they said, “No, we really mean that you have to do this, and you have to hold panels with small businesses.”
The agencies have been required for 45 years to look at how their rules impact—every single rule—how it impacts small businesses. That might sound like news to you because the agencies just haven’t been doing it. So our office has not had a head chief counsel in over eight and a half years.
Bryan:
Wow.
Chip:
And this administration came in and said, “Not today, no longer,” and they took swift movements and I arrived on day one, and we’ve already been scoring huge wins for small business—rolling back regulations that they were powerless to impact because they weren’t going to spend 15 years, like I did, understanding public policy to be in this role.
Bryan:
Can you give us one simple example of a regulation that had a huge impact like that?
Chip:
Yeah. A lot of regulations that have the most impact are small ones that impact the most people. One example is Treasury had this requirement—Beneficial Ownership Information—that you had to say who owned your business. If someone had a co-investor, what’s their information? And a lot of the firms—it wasn’t as simple as just “put your name here” because like I’ve got middle names, I’ve got a suffix, which one do I put down there?
It takes me time just to fill out a form, and I’ve filled out millions of forms, and this is across the universe of tens of millions of small businesses. The idea was possibly admirable—to cut down on money-laundering—but the impact was, businesses said, “I have to fill out this form, and Treasury is saying they’re going to fine me,” I think it’s $500 a day, “if we don’t comply. I need help.”
The average estimate that I read of an analysis that looked at this said it was $8,000 per small business that had to register, and there’s tens of millions of these businesses. So Treasury came out—we’d been sending letters to Treasury and saying small businesses are telling us that this is onerous, it’s costing them a lot of money—so they came out with an interim final rule just about a month or so ago, and it rolled back $47 billion of impact over ten years.
That is discounted because about 40 percent of existing firms had already complied, so we couldn’t count that as benefit. Another $30 billion was expended by small businesses across the country for something that was just putting your name on a registry.
Bryan:
So all my friends who finally, after the back-and-forth, who didn’t have to fill it out, can now thank you personally for helping get that out of the way.
Chip:
Yeah, exactly. And for all those who filled it out and paid a consultant to do it, I feel you. That’s just—that’s terrible. We should not be flip-flopping on small businesses. My approach is let’s take things out of the way instead of flip-flopping back and forth—and lock them in. Lock them in low, and lock them in without obligating a business to do something that doesn’t have any tangible benefit to them or really the broader economy.
Local Impressions
Bryan:
Now, you’ve been touring around a whole bunch of cities. You’ve got 68 local offices that you manage, and I’m really curious—you know, you’re here in Williamson County, Round Rock specifically. Was there anything about what you’ve seen here, what you’ve heard from the entrepreneurs here, that really stuck out for you?
Lisa:
Absolutely. I think where we’re seeing locations that have success are the ones that are working together. You have local government working with educational institutions and working with the small businesses. Now, you still need the primary-sector businesses and their input, but to include the voice of small business is something that has been somewhat rare in some of the locations.
We were actually able to go out to the community college and talk about some of the workforce programs that they have, and not only what they currently have, but what they’re doing to position this area for the future—that is tremendous. So to have everyone in the same direction, going the same way with the same vision, is what’s really going to help this area move forward.
Bryan:
Yeah, we’re very fortunate with the workforce, obviously, from the chamber as well as the nonprofits and the schools. We just had Julie Leser from Texas State on the podcast a few weeks ago and talked about, again, workforce development—making sure we’ve got people ready to go. I mean, I come from New York—very, very different environment—and watching what I see here and the community working together, I didn’t quite see that when I was growing up in New York. It was different.
Lisa:
And the thing is, small businesses already knew that secret because you have small-business owners. If you go up to a small-business owner and say, “You know what? I have a friend that is doing something. Would you talk to them?”—no matter how busy they are, if they’re on hour 99 of the week—“Absolutely, how can I help?” And that’s the first thing a small-business owner does: “Let me stop to help somebody else up so that we can all succeed together.”
They already knew that secret sauce, but to have, like you said, the education institutions as well as economic development, the chambers—it’s amazing, and that is something that this area should be proud of.
Bryan:
Yeah, I know I am. I’m so excited to be part of it, because my wife and I own a small business in the area as well, and just—the support of the community makes it so much easier. Every night when you go to bed, you’re like, “Okay, I know people have my back. People are looking out for me. People are recommending me because I’m part of this community.”
And then I look at some businesses that fail, because that’s the scary part, right? We know a lot of entrepreneurs start new businesses and fail. I’m curious because you’ve probably got more data than most—where’s the failure coming from? Is it because a lot of them aren’t tapping into communities and into their customers?
Lisa:
I think that could be some of it. Sometimes it’s as simple as asking the local community, “You know what—did you like a Facebook post or an Instagram post? Did you share it? When was the last time you, as a community member, went to a small business?”
We need to make sure that we’re supporting locally. That is step one, and making it a conscious effort I think is very, very important. But then also normalizing it to reach out for help, because we usually don’t, and we need to realize that it’s not about saying “I am failing. I need help.” It’s “I want to succeed even more. I need the help.”
Bryan:
I like that re-frame. I think that’s a powerful story to be able to tell ourselves, because no one wants to admit they’re failing, they’re drowning—you know, they’ve got an elephant sitting on their chest (that does relate to my last book, I Think I Swallowed an Elephant). But to say, “Yes, I want to succeed more”—that’s just such a great re-frame, to say, “Okay, I’m doing the best I can—how do I get better?”
Lisa:
Absolutely. Because, you know, I want to say maybe 2018-2019 we had businesses come to us—“Hey, do I need to do this social media thing?”—and I remember some of the clients and the counselors looking at them saying, “Do you want to be here in five years?”
Sometimes it’s hard to look at what’s new, and it can be scary. There can be a long runway to learn it. So being able to just say, “You know what, I don’t know about that. Let me learn more. Let me figure out how I can reach new markets, how I can tap into the strengths and the artificial intelligence that’s out there—that’s new—so how can we take advantage of that to move forward?”
Bryan:
Yeah, I was just thinking as you were saying that—and I want to touch with you, because I imagine there’s got to be a lot of concerns from a regulatory perspective: what AI is going to do to the workforce, what it’s currently doing to the workforce, what it’s going to look like preparing people for the future, and what are you thinking from this advocacy point of view and regulation point of view?
AI & Regulation
Chip:
Yeah, I think the conclusion is, I think AI is pretty awesome. I think that it is enabling people to stop taking their time to dig for an answer that they maybe heard a month or a year ago and they can’t remember what it was, and they’re digging through papers. Now you can ask AI—with a good prompt—what’s the answer; it comes at the top of the mind, and then you can actually be productive.
That is, like, on a microcosm of what we’re hearing from small businesses across the country. They’re saying, “Look, we’ve actually expanded our workforce as we’ve integrated AI, because now we need people to put it to work.” AI and machines don’t mind doing little tedious tasks that some humans do. We’re seeing that it builds into the ecosystem.
One thing that it does for regulations is—I’ve started getting just a slew of texts from friends who know that I’m in this, I’m working on deregulation, and they’re saying, “Hey, we know these developers and they just developed an AI to look through regulatory codes to say”—the President had an executive order that said, “Okay, I want all the agencies to look at which regulations are illegal, which ones were stretching what they’re supposed to do, which ones are overlapping with others,” and it had a bunch of buckets—and just last week I got a text about someone who had created an AI bot to go in and bucket regulations by evaluating terms and the language. The digestibility of these models is just really impressive.
So I think that there will be issues. Businesses need to adapt, but they had to adapt to the wheel; they had to adapt to the computer, to the car, instead of horse and buggies.
Bryan:
Yes. It’s interesting—a friend of mine: you might have heard of him, Paul Allen, who started Ancestry.com. I was with him—he came to visit a few weeks ago, actually probably a couple of months ago; time flies—but he has a new project called Soar AI, and he has one of his projects called Citizen Portal, and it monitors all the communities and everything they’re saying.
He was talking about, from a manufacturer point of view, you can start seeing when municipalities are talking about adding in playground equipment. If you’re a playground-equipment manufacturer now, you should be reaching out to them because they just passed a bond for it. It’s like, yeah—the power of AI; you couldn’t do that beforehand because you couldn’t tap into every municipality around.
Chip:
People have talked about knowledge is power and information is currency, and we’ve had a huge push for higher education in this country and around the world, really, and I think that you’re spot-on that AI is really just another tool for knowledge and aggregation. The more—to your example—the more cities that are out there looking for good playground equipment—I’ve got kids; some playground equipment is not good and others are awesome—and if we had more competition in those fields based on these models and finding good customers is one of the huge restrictions to small business.
We’ve already seen the internet provide that through platforms, through just the internet itself, but just being able to be found.
Bryan:
Yes, exactly. So it’s curious, because if now I can get into manufacturing and I can kind of see those trends ahead of time because of AI, what kind of big opportunities do you see coming up in the next few years for manufacturing in this country?
Lisa:
Absolutely. I think there’s a lot of opportunity out there, but we have to look at the game board differently. We have to approach it differently because competition is different. AI puts a whole new dynamic on it.
I think that some of the things that we’ve put out there—we have an on-shoring portal now, we’re working on kind of the On-shoring 101 Handbook to just teach people what are—what’s the first step? Just tell me what the first step is and I can take it from there.
So, utilizing the tools that are out there—once you utilize AI and kind of look at, “All right, where do I need to position my company?”—then look at, “Is there another company I can have a strategic alliance with? Is there somebody that’s doing what I need to do but doing it better, or doing it really well?” Then maybe I can replicate that. Maybe I can reach out to them and have them be an adviser for us, or a supplier, or a partner.
I think that is what we need to look at as far as being willing to pivot and change. I hate using the word “pivot.” I know we heard that so much, but truly it fits. And being able to acknowledge what we need and looking at our strengths and not trying to develop more strengths ourselves, but use the people around us, the companies around us. It’s a team sport.
Rapid Change & Education
Bryan:
It’s fascinating because, obviously none of us were around when we went from horse and buggy to cars. We’re all a little too young for that. But I was in the very early days of the internet rolling out, and I remember not being a fan of Amazon, not being a fan of different businesses and how they were going, but I look at what Dell has done—other companies—how powerful the internet has become and how much it’s changed things.
And now I look at AI and I’m like, okay, it looks like that same revolution, just faster.
Lisa:
Yes.
Bryan:
And that’s scary sometimes for people, and I wonder, again, regulations get put in place because people have fears. How do we deal with that?
Chip:
Yeah. I think—what—sunlight is the best antiseptic, right? I think looking at why people are afraid, why things are inaccessible—I think with AI that’s really big. People think AI, they hear robots, they watch them on TV, and I think that’s part of the branding gone wrong because really it’s just a tool that helps you understand and search stuff much more efficiently.
So I think that that’s already changing. I think the use cases are really emerging, and I think the people claiming to fear AI are often very different than the people who are using AI every day. I think that kids—the next generation—is using AI, and I think that it’s actually a bright future. We’re hearing a lot of scary stuff because we’re in a demographic that’s maybe a little more scared than a younger demographic.
But I think that this touches a theme, which is: people are afraid of things they don’t understand and they don’t know, and there are opportunities to take advantage of that. I use that for my own regulatory work: people hear regulations and they say, “Change the channel,” but really a regulation is like—I phrase it as: “What’s your pain point?”
“Oh, I can talk about a pain point. I’m not so scared about that.” Or I say, “Hey, what has caused you to miss dinner with your kids in the last week?”
Bryan:
Yes.
Chip:
What—it’s usually something exogenous, something from the outside that has changed your schedule, and that’s usually because you have a fire to put out or you’ve got a form to fill out or you’ve got a process, or something’s keeping you up at night because you can’t crack this nut.
And a lot of times it’s not the product; it is some process you have to—or hoop you have to jump through, a process you have to go through to get to where you want to be. I think just with AI we can take the scariness off by showing how it practically helps us. With regulations, let’s take the scary off and say, “These things impact your life, and we can get them out of the way.”
Bryan:
So instead of hiring ten-year-olds to work in the bakery, maybe they hire some young kids to be their chief AI officer as they’re moving forward.
Chip:
I’ve actually heard that sometime this week—I heard about kids who are saying, “Hey, like, we already have tech issues. What if we had kids come in and work for an hour a day and just set up our meetings and our iPads would all be working?”
Lisa:
Yeah, my kids—all they use is ChatGPT and others. They don’t use Google anymore.
Chip:
Well, I’m from where I had to help my parents figure out the VCR.
Lisa:
Yeah.
Bryan:
You know, and when I first did programming, it was punch cards. So we’ve come a long way and it’s new and yeah, it can be intimidating, but it can also really open up new doors that we never even thought were available to us. Even when you look back to today, there are things that you couldn’t have even imagined and here’s where we are today and we accept it as a daily-life thing. So being able to really get people to expand what they think normal should look like or what tomorrow should look like is the key.
Chip:
I think there’s one thing that you just brought to my mind that I’ve seen in practice: the speed at which AI allows you to answer a question with a high degree of confidence. We were just holding a roundtable with a bunch of businesses here locally, and there were a couple of people that said stuff and I said, “Wait a second, this rings a bell. I know there’s a data point, but I don’t want to mislead people because they’re going to march out of here and think that I gave them”—right?
So I did a three-second search: what is this? And it popped the answer and gave me the number that I was looking for. It was in the range of what I thought—I just didn’t know exactly what. And if we can integrate sound knowledge into our communication, into our business—how many times has a small-business owner said, “Wait a second, I heard there might be a faster way for me to code this Excel spreadsheet. I don’t know what”—if you could ask AI, how many hours would you save? How many meals would you be able to have with your family? How many more connections could you make? How many more products could you develop?
So I think it’s really the assistant that—for me, it’s the memory jogger.
Bryan:
Yeah. Even a simple example: I was making some tweaks on one of my websites and I had some formatting issue. I took a screenshot, I put it in ChatGPT, I said, “Why am I getting this? What do I need to add to the code to remove it?” Three seconds later, I had the answer, solved, done, and I didn’t waste an hour of banging my head trying to move things around. It’s like, yeah, like, to me that’s where, you know, I wonder how we’re going to start approaching—because one of the things that the SBA is doing now that it didn’t beforehand is work across different agencies.
Cross-Agency Cooperation
Lisa:
Absolutely.
Bryan:
And obviously, I think education is going to have to be one of the biggest things that’s going to change because the knowledge that we need to have is now at our fingertips. Like, it’s going to be embedded on a chip. We don’t need the internet. It’ll be on a chip on your phone. You’ll just have all of that. How do we prepare for that?
Lisa:
You know, you brought up about working across agencies, and there have been so many silos in the past, but what we’re looking at is—when you look at manufacturing, we can’t have a discussion on manufacturing without talking about workforce. Well, workforce—Department of Labor. However, we need to be working together. What issues they bring up to us, we can look at fixes on our side, and also my team, as we’re putting some of these things together—we’re reaching out to Department of Commerce, to Treasury, to USDA—name the alphabet soup—because no one agency can do this alone.
The only way we’re going to find success to continue moving everything forward is by working together. So I do see so many more people saying, “How can we help you?” We’ve seen it on the regulatory side—all the agencies reaching out there. So we’re seeing a new day and it’s exciting. That’s why we agreed to be a part of this.
Bryan:
Well, I’ve known for my 30 years of working around industry—silos are the killer. Like, that’s just it. Big business, small business—if you’re in a silo, if you’re trying to do everything on your own, you’re in trouble.
Chip:
Silos and committees.
Bryan:
Silos and committees. Correct. Right. Tomato. They talk about—you know, Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs both had like a two-pizza rule, right? Like small teams being able to work together, integrated.
I want to end on one last question because I’m fascinated. You have all these teams across the country.
Lisa:
Yes.
Bryan:
How do you measure and manage success down to the customer level? How do you know you’re impacting your customers?
Lisa:
You know, that’s the million-dollar question. Could we do better? I think we can, and I think we’re getting there because we’re looking at all of that. We’re utilizing AI. We’re talking to other agencies: What are we doing that we could help you more? We’re also teaching our folks in the field that we’re not the answer to every question, and let’s figure out who is doing what so we can make sure we promote other agencies, we promote other programs.
Our success is, at the end of the day, that small business is around tomorrow.
Bryan:
Yeah. And so, if you can have those conversations—if they just go visit that district office or the local office—that’s success for you today.
Lisa:
100 percent.
Closing & Resources
Bryan:
Awesome. Lisa, Chip, thank you so much for your time today. Really appreciate you sharing everything about the SBA. I know there’s a million questions we can go into, but if people have more questions about the SBA, what’s your number-one tip?
Chip:
I think we launched something a couple of months ago called the Red Tape Hotline. If you want to engage with us and you want to share an issue, you can either call the number and go to a call center or you can go online—RedTape.gov—and you can tell us what your issue is.
To your point of tracking and our metrics, it goes into a system and we try to follow up, and we try to follow up with small businesses, because every small business that reaches out to us represents a thousand, ten thousand, a million other small businesses that aren’t able to. So what we’re trying to do is provide that customer service, provide that proof of concept, and that’s—if they want to reach out, reach out through that, and you’re going to get help.
Lisa:
Absolutely. And I would add SBA.gov, and you can search for your local district office, get in touch with them, and they’re going to be that connector, that convener, to get you the assistance you need.
Bryan:
I appreciate your time today. Thank you very much.
Lisa & Chip:
Thank you.