AUDIO: Business leader says it’s time for a 'Super SBA'

ORLANDO, FLA.
February 4, 2008 12:01am

Small business advocate George Cloutier says the Small Business Administration is not even close to addressing the needs of the nation’s 23 million small businesses and needs a major make over.

The SBA should be turned into a “super SBA” with a five-fold increase in budget, he says.

Mr. Cloutier, chairman and chief executive officer of American Management Services Inc., of Orlando, Fla., recently outlined his proposals in a speech accepting an award at the U.S. Conference of Mayors' winter meeting in Washington.

He says the SBA budget should be increased so it can guarantee far more loans for small businesses to get these firms off the hook of predatory lenders.

“Some small businesses in this country are paying 150 percent to predatory but legal, apparently, loan companies,” he says. “If money was available more easily from the SBA they wouldn’t have to pay 150 percent.”

Mr. Cloutier says he knows of these problems from his work as chairman of Partner America, a small business growth program that works in partnership with U.S. Conference of Mayors to offer small companies management advice, advice on how to get government contracts and technical assistance and education.

In addition to not being able to help more small businesses financially, the SBA’s top management is out of touch with small business reality, Mr. Cloutier says.

“The current administrator, while a nice guy and probably very competent, he was a CFO of a billion dollar company. I would like to understand what he knows about small business,” Mr. Cloutier says.

(If you run or work for a small business, you’ll want to listen to our CVBT Audio Interview with George Cloutier. Please click on the link below to listen or to download the MP3 audio file to your computer or iPod.)

“We think small businesses have been getting short sheeted,” Mr. Cloutier said in his remarks to the U.S. Conference of Mayors. “It’s time for politicians to step up and do something specifically for small businesses, one of the major engines of our inner city and metro economies.

“Wall Street is screaming for stimuli, expecting large tax breaks and consumer refunds to benefit big business and asking nothing for Main Street, which is the critical building block of our inner city and metro economies,” he said.

One solution via an enlarged SBA would be consolidating the dozens of programs for small businesses that remain largely hidden within the overall federal bureaucracy, he says.

“Throughout the government, there are programs in 30 or 40 various agencies … and no one knows these programs even exist or barely know it,” he says. “My idea would be like a mutual fund. You create one single number, you promote the heck out of that number and you would have trained – and I underline the word ‘trained’ operators – who would answer questions on where small businesses could get resources.”