Apr 27, 2020
He began his outdoor career
in the '60s working for Dick Kelty, he started a couple of outdoor
businesses with his brother, was an executive with VF for quite a
few years, has taken numerous adventures near and far with his wife
Katie and is now helping small businesses navigate these
challenging times. Jim Thomsen discusses the current business
environment and offers advice and strategies for taking
action.
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Show notes
"the most critical thing that you should be doing right now is conserving cash and make sure you save that cash."
You're helping a lot of small business owners sort through the SBA programs, how did you get involved with the SBA?
The
Small Business Development Center has locations all over the
country funded by the SBA. What they offer is in normal times is
really excellent business consulting. They'll help you do business
plans and cash flow statements and they have experts in all the
offices to help you. If you wanted to work out a social media
program or marketing plan, finances, they have people who
specialize in that. Not just SBA loans but all kinds of different
financing. And the work that the small business development centers
do is totally free to businesses.
I had
known about it but never really worked with it. It's a super great
group of people and every business should sign up with them because
you don't have to listen to anybody. You could ask them anything.
They have all kinds of resources and it's 100% free.
The
group in central California also includes the
Eastern Sierra. Since the main offices are in Bakersfield, Inyo and
Mono county are not a convenient place for them to come over. But
Once a year they do a big economic conference here explaining
different offerings that they have. At this last one, they asked me
to be a speaker there because they wanted a section on
crowdfunding. I had just done the Kickstarter program for
Wilderness Experience, and since I had done it all myself, I
learned all the little parts of it. So I was one of the speakers
and I got to know the director and a few other people. He kept
saying, you know, you would be perfect, you gotta help us over here
in Eastern Sierra because we have plenty of small businesses that
could use some help. I said, well you know, it sounds
perfect.
I
helped one store for about an hour or two and was thinking I’m
never going to be a very good consultant just because I'm not going
to be around. Once we got back from Patagonia, all of a sudden
we're stuck. You know, inside our condo with nothing going on and
every small business in town is having a problem. So they called
and said would you start helping on these? A lot of people are
stuck at home with nothing to do right now.
And, and I'm busier than I've
ever been.
How are you helping, what are you doing with small business owners?
Most
of it over this last month has been trying to get the different SBA
loans because those are ones that have been pushed. There's a lot
of money behind them. The loans are actually really good for
businesses but it's still government loans. So it's not easy. It's
not something that you could just apply for. So I'm helping the
different businesses first understand the different loans and why
one may be better for them than another, the good points of them,
the bad points of them, and then how to apply and how to get all
their information together and get the loan. That's been what I've
really spent most of my time doing.
How many different types of loans are available, three or four right?
There's actually more, but there are two main ones and
it's the ones you probably, nobody would've ever known before. Now
they're in the news a lot. One
is called the economic injury disaster loan.
It's actually part of the SBA
disaster program, which normally is used after an earthquake or a
hurricane and they come in and help rebuild. They use that same
program for this, except the record number of loans previously was
I think for Katrina. They had 11,000 applicants over a three day
period. This one they had 3 million in four days. So when people
say, Oh, it's impossible to deal with them, you can't thru. They
probably were unprepared for that.
The other one is the payroll protection
plan. And that's to try to keep businesses paying their employees.
From a government point of view, it's goal is to keep people from
getting laid off and collecting unemployment. From the business
perspective that allows them, if they've got good employees, to
keep those people. Keep paying them, if they offer health insurance
keep that going. If they get the money and actually keep people
employed and paid, the loan is 100% forgiven.
And
some businesses, like one of the ones I’ve worked with, at one of
his locations he was trying to do some remodeling inside and it was
always a problem cause they were open. Now he has two of his
employees working, doing work inside rebuilding one of their
buildings. There are two people in there, they can make it safe and
no problem. He's actually getting value out of the employees while
paying them. I've got a couple of other ones that have young
employees that are here in Mammoth because they want to ski and
play. They are really good at computer things and setting up web
sites and things. So they're getting a lot of work from these guys,
helping them finally get a good website, which they'd never had
before.
What should small business owners be doing now besides trying to get loans?
To
me, the most critical thing that you should be doing right now is
conserving cash and make sure you save that cash. That means
calling everybody you owe money to every payment you have and
trying to get them to either, defer the payments or forgive some or
to give you longer terms or something. I know it's really hard and
I've had retail stores where I've had trouble paying bills. It's
hard calling people, but you just have to do it. At least at this
time, nobody's going to ask you what really happened cause they
know what happened, right?
The
second most important thing tied in with that is to do a true cash
flow statement. Something that I always tell everybody in business
that you have to do. Because that's the critical thing. Keep your
cash flow statement updated as things change. So you know what
position you're in and now it's more critical than ever. It is
really hard to guess what your revenue is going to be this month or
next month. But you should be able to get to the point where you
have an idea of what money you're going to have going out. The
first time you do a cash flow statement, it's not going to be
accurate, but you should be updating that every few days just if
nothing else. It makes you think about your business.
Things We Talked About
Economic Injury Disaster Loan (currently it is closed as of 4/26, but should reopen
sometime, hopefully soon)
Jim
LinkedIn:
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Profile
Jim
Email: jamesthomsen@outlook.com