Hello and welcome to another episode of the making it in Asheville podcast. This is your friendly neighborhood podcast where each week we sit down with an Asheville based small business owner, entrepreneur, community leader and ask them what they're making in Asheville and how they are making it in Asheville. And this week we sit down with Matt Raker, executive director of Mountain Bisworx. Mountain Bisworx has come up on the podcast probably more than any other local resource. They do funding and education for WNC.
Based businesses, and it's honestly really great.
To have them in the community. And so Mountain Bizwerks has been leading a lot of the financial charge, how to, how to solve for this new way that Asheville will have to.
I.
Guess, get comfortable with and move forward with. And so Matt Riker, executive director, has been in the role for, I think this January coming up, it'll be five years. He's been in comparable roles both at Mountain biswerks and in other WNC based community economic development type organizations. And so the conversation I want to lead with the lead, I try to keep it focused. The scope of what we could talk about when thinking about Asheville and western North Carolina based recovery scope could be massive. This conversation, we tried to focus on small businesses specifically and support for small businesses, small business owners. The highlights look like Mountain Bisworx has a three pronged approach. They want to lead with information, they want to follow with economic disaster, bridge loans, and they have incredible resource that is on the show notes page and we talk about throughout the conversation. And then their third pillar and hope is to create a mechanism for emergency bridge grant funding. Big difference between loan funding and grant funding. And so we talk through that. Conversation is powerful. Conversation is needed. I have a ton of notes. Those notes I'm not going to talk about necessarily right now. They are available on makingitville.com under the episode number. It'll be on the homepage links if you're listening to this in real time. Otherwise, wherever you're listening to it, I'll have an immediate link to the episode for you. Without further ado, let's get into this conversation and let's start talking about what's available to small business owners locally. And if you are hoping to be of use to the community, into the region, you want to support small business.
It looks like there's going to be.
Two main ways to do it. All that and more discussed in this episode. So let's shoot into it now.
So thank you for joining me. Matt Riker, executive director of Mountain Biz Works. I suspect in the future I'll have done an intro so we don't have to necessarily get into the details. Imagine details have been delivered. I mean, perhaps, like, what is the soundbite if there were one, that you would want to start a conversation that people who care about actual based, western North Carolina based businesses, what would you want them to hear from mountain bizworks today?
Well, our community has been hammered, you know, really, really hit hard by Helene. We are. It's unbelievable. This community is so special. You know, how people are coming together to support each other both on the individual level as well as thinking about how we rebuild all that's so unique to us. And we need all the friends we can get from around the country, from around the state. I think it's been so incredible. We've already seen so much of that. But that's so helpful and so encouraging because this is just, you can't put into words yet the level of impact that we've seen in Asheville and across western North Carolina. Yeah.
If there were any potentially, like, bullets on impact or attempts to quantify the level of disruption, has anything stood out to you as, like, the thing you would say when a friend calls, like, here's what we're dealing with in western North Carolina.
You know, it's really difficult to boil it down to bullet points, but we've got, there's impacts of different levels across the region. And we know for one, the timing of this couldn't have been worse as we enter the fall kind of tour season wherever, you know, of course, hospitality and tourism is one of our big drivers in our, in our region. And it's the season where so many of our hospitality businesses get into the black, you know, and so we're going to lose that whole season. So on top of all the direct kind of impacts they have, you know, we're also losing that whole season. And we know that will also then kind of drag into next year as well. The infrastructure. Over 100 bridges, Dot has said have been destroyed. It will have to be rebuilt. There's so many roads that are out as well that are going to have to, of course, the big ones being I 40 west. We're looking at a year plus to get that reopened. I 26 north. Um, a long time to get that reopened.
Yeah. And so I think that's, I'm going to pin it there because that is, you know, the impact is, I've been saying, incalculable. Right. It's, it's impossible to even try and wrangle. And so the aperture through which you could attempt to talk about making sense of what the next steps look like is massive. And so this conversation we're going to try and punch in tight. I know we're not unlimited with time. And so the aperture I want to try and talk about is small business in western North Carolina, specifically Asheville, but small business generally and specifically what resources exist today. And then you might see coming down the pike if you have any kind of color on what's coming up. Impact is incredible. The hundred bridges, the water with no real timeline on when water is coming back. Right. So our number one export is water. And when do we have that again? Right. So if it's not hospitality, it's maybe beverage as like the flag we fly as a community. Holy smokes. The, the dot, dot, dot. Question mark, question mark. There is alarming in a word. So when thinking about resources for specifically small businesses, small business owners in Asheville, what are the mountain bizworks like? I guess like resources, primary resources. What are the things that you want people to know exist right now already?
Well, I think first I want to start, Tony, with just saying, you know, we've got, you know, three primary recovery pillars that we're focused on and not, and we're working to get somebody stood up, you know, so not everything's available day one, but we want to let folks know this recovery will take some time and there will be more resources coming out, you know, than what's been available day one. But we're really focused on first having really good information. So, you know, on our website, mountainbizworks.org, comma, you can go to the main website. There's an alert banner at the top. It says lean resources, recovery resources folks can go there and kind of get a summary of everything we'll talk about here today. But, like, you know, what are some key first steps you need to do for your business and what's available now? So that's, you know, mountainbizworks.org, comma, you can find that. And we've got a number of partners across the region and staff here on our team that are all around making sure that we help folks be able to navigate what resources are available. And we'll talk about some. But the specific ones that are available in specific business may vary. So I say there are people available, whether it's through mountain bizwerks, through the business recovery center, you know, at the Asheville Chamber, you can go in person, you know, there. And we've got folks there, SBtDc has folks there. SBA has folks there. FEMA is there sometimes. So it was a number of different resources you can go talk to in person and kind of help navigate what's going on. So that, that's one. Then there's what we're calling kind of emergency bridge loans. Okay, we'll come into that. And then the third one is emergency grants. So grant support, because we, you know, loans are really important, but we also know we need to set up some grant resources, and we're working hard on that. This week, we're deploying some small grants that we, to some of the folks that we've been working with a lot kind of directly, but we're also partnering with a lot of folks to raise more. And there's a number of organizations across the region that have stood up programs that are all super important. So, you know, whether it's the various arts programs or different things, I think, you know, on our resource page, you can find a list of those. But we know that we need a bigger program as well, and we're working really hard on that.
And key differentiation between bridge loans, emergency bridge loans, and emergency grant funding is payment terms, ionib grants. Money moves one way, one direction. You get it, you have to apply for it. There's some level of diligence done on who's going to get grant money, but it is no strings attached. It goes to you. And bridge loans right now, as far as my awareness is, they're fairly fast and fairly favorable in terms of the terms tied to the dollars that show up. So exceptionally low interest rates for the current market and some level of time horizons that that changes. But it gets you from today or a week from now to the next time you need to raise money or sort things out.
That's right. Yeah. Yeah. So let's talk about the bridge loan. So Monday, last Monday, October 7, we launched the WNC strong Helene Business Recovery fund. And so those are really designed to be that. Emergency bridge loans, up to $100,000. Like you said, Tony, to help those businesses that need some funds to be able to meet those immediate needs and get towards some longer term recovery resources. And those could come in a variety of ways. It could be some FEMA disaster grants. They get to help pay for specific physical damages and cleanup and whatnot that folks may have. That would be the SBA disaster loans, which we can talk more about. The terms on those would be really important for folks. But we know that there's going to be some, there could be some delays in folks getting access to those just because of the volume and some other things, it could be insurance payments. So anyway, we know there's longer term resources that will become available. It takes some time. These are to help those folks keep their key employees on the payroll, to help with cleanup costs, to help repurchase inventory if they need to pay their mortgage or whatever those kind of immediate needs are. These immediate bridge loans are really designed to help with that. So that's the WC strong, a lean business recovery fund. And again, that's a program that mountain biz works, is the administer of. We've got a bunch of partners on that. We're administering that so you can go to our website, find details on that.
And so I have some details in front of me that I'll read and just tell me if anything has changed since the Instagram post about it. But up to $100,000 in funding, up to a six year payment term. The first year. Twelve months would be a 1% interest only payment with a 6% rate for regular payments after year. One requires some level of a personal guarantee and is secured by business assets. And then there's a second page, I think, decisions aiming for a seven to ten day timeline, which seems exceptionally fast for traditional funding design to bridge SBA, FEMA insurance, and other long term recovery funding. Streamlined online, no credit score minimum, no closing costs, no prepayment penalty, and then it's subject to commercial collection processes. The thing that stands out is if someone's assets were devastated in this, like, how. How does someone whose inventory got crushed or the place where their inventory was or their, you know, their business relied on physical things, and those physical things are damaged or destroyed or missing totally. How does a business like that get money today? Is that grants versus anything that would be collateralized debt?
Well, I think you're gonna have to use a combination, you know. Well, certainly pursue any grants that you can, and we're working to raise more grants. Those take time to pull together. So, you know, there's some available now, but there'll be more coming, sure. But I think they're not gonna. They will not cover your full need, most likely. I think for a lot of folks, you'll probably have some additional impacts that you got to cover. And so you may need to look to some of the recovery loans, whether it's our immediate bridge loans or then rolling that into an SBA disaster loan as well. I think folks need to kind of think about what is their recovery and reopening plan look like and start to get a plan in place. For that. And we were talking one of our businesses who lost their building, gone, got wiped away, all their inventory, all their equipment. So what do they do? Thinking about, all right, what's a, you know, they're very committed to getting reopened. You know, what, where's a new, at least temporary interim location that they can work out of, you know, start to reorder some of their inventory and get that up and going so they can get their business going again. Yeah. So they'll be prioritizing some of these funds towards those things to help get at least a base of their business operating again and then grow from there.
And then as a, you know, the exact opposite. Right. So let's say you are not inventory focused, necessarily, or physical product focused, but you rely on the fact that millions of people come to Asheville every year to, like, look at leaves and drink beer and hike, and those people might not be showing up. And so now you have what might be a demand side catastrophe for your business. I guess part of it is what does the application look like? And one business owner who reached out is, I think I have to fundamentally change my business to survive a non tourist driven economy for whatever the foreseeable future looks like.
Yeah. Well, firstly, the WNC, strong bridge loans. We're looking at how your business was performing pre Helene. So we realize that right now. And post Helene, it's going to look very different. But so how you qualify is, hey, if you were a sound business beforehand and you've got a reasonable idea of how you might be able to get back, at some point, you'll be able to qualify for something through that program. And in there, we encourage folks to, if theyre pivoting totally, thats fine, thats great. And some folks can use these funds to help them pivot. You can also use the funds also, if youre just like, were going to have a revenue gap of some period of time, and we need to use this to help cover some of that, to bridge us until revenue comes back or until we get some of that again, the larger, longer term recovery funds.
There'S a whole bunch of acronyms that I wrote down in preparation for the call. So SBA, small business association, I guess, of the United States. So it's a federal level SBA. And am I right that you are like a local SBA lender, or am I mixing words up? And then the only other acronyms that were new to me is SBTDC and then EDP and C. So economic Development partnership of North Carolina was the last one. The other one, I couldn't find what the acronym actually stood for, but they both seem to be doing great work for North Carolina businesses. And are they all facilitating SBA loans? Or is it a different mechanism in some of these different regional or local funding solutions?
Yep. So the SBA disaster loans that you can. You can get assistance on both physical damage and what they call economic injury. So, like lost revenue and those sorts of things. Those SBA disaster loans, you apply directly to the SBA, so they don't work through any other lenders or intermediaries like ourselves or others. For those, those are 100% direct through the SBA. If you need help with your application process, you know, or like, pulling it together, you know, those other entities, ourselves, SBCDC, EDP and C, can help guide and help navigate someone through the process of, like, what's going to be required. If. What can you do if your tax returns or your business financials were in your building that got washed away? You know, there are some solutions and we can talk folks through what some of those options are. So the other acronyms on there are more helping guide folks, but the loans are directly through SBA.
SBA, okay. And then your WNC strong Helene fund is not SBA backed. That is your own fundraising campaign to support that.
That's right. So that's. Those are offered through mountain bizworks. Think of that as the local and statewide response. Okay, so there's a. We have, there's a statewide partner called the Golden Leaf Foundation, a great foundation as economic development work across North Carolina. And they committed seven and a half million dollars to the fund to help get it off the ground. We've got another. We're up to about 11 million right now in commitment, so we're hoping to grow it to 50 million total on there. And I'll just tell folks that we're doing that as quick as we can. We're trying to make decisions as fast as we can. We know that the level of demand is.
Incalculable as well.
In one week, we've already got 425 applications totaling over 28 million in requests. And those businesses are estimating an uninsured economic loss to their business of 70 million. Tremendous impacts just from those 425. And we know there are thousands of these.
To me, that's the headline, and I thank you for sharing that. And now I'm going to flip the entire conversation quickly. So you're trying to raise, let's say, 70 million, 100 million people. I feel like one of the things I wanted to look at was timelines. So we have 2024. We have this 2025 that's going to look unlike any year, full calendar year in western North Carolina that probably ever maybe since post other massive flood, but to a scale that makes the other ones feel silly to even bring up in conversation. And then we have like, until the rest of 2030 ish. I would say that the rebuilding reimagination of western North Carolina is a decade or decades long conversation at this point. So I guess two immediate questions when thinking about, like, this timeline thing is, I do feel that there is some level of urgency for raising money from people who do not live in the region and pulling on some level of sympathy and support. And so knowing that some folks in the network have the ability to call on folks who want to donate or invest or something and support what look like some of the best options, is it connecting them to you or to the Golden Leaf foundation? What does an investor or donate like? Is that money donated to Golden Leaf? Is that a fund like experience where they're getting part of the return on money that's being donated and earning some of that 6% over six years? Where does big money show up in western North Carolina to help with some of this rebuild.
We are calling for? We want to see a grants program that really meets the moment. And we think here at Bisworx, it needs to be at least $20 million in that pool. So that's a big. That's a big lift. We are leaning in with a number of partners. So if people are, I think, really want to show up and help support the region, I think that's number one to think about is how we capitalize that pool and they can reach out directly to mountain biz works. We're just about to kind of put together a facility around that. It may end up living in another apartment. We'll make sure that it all gets there to the right folks. And then we're raising 50 million in the recovery loans, starting with these emergency up to $100,000 bridge loans. We know those will have to transition as folks kind of get a picture of what their longer term recovery needs are. We'll probably have larger recovery loans available through the WNC strong fund as well. And so we're engaging partners on those, and they're providing us 0% money to build out that recovery lending pool there. And then as those loans get repaid by businesses, as they get reopened and paid down the loans, we send all that loan capital back to the funders. So that's another really good way. If you're like, hey, I've got a million dollars. Go take this, go put it to work. And then a year, two years, three years, what's it all back? Give me what's back. And there'll be some losses. We know not everyone's gonna get reopened, but we think we'll see at least 80% to 90% repayment rates overall on this program.
And so someone who wants to. I'm making words up. If someone wants to participate in the disaster recovery loans, that is a investment decision. That is like participating in any other fund or investment protocol, except much lower return rate. If someone's going to invest in the grant, would that be considered on a tax basis, like a donation? So that is a tax write off. Hey, I'm going to throw 50,000 into this nonprofit, and this makes me sleep a little better at night. I'm helping the people of western North Carolina. So different financial engines for those two ways to serve the region.
Yeah, yeah. And there will be. You're not going to get a big return.
Sure.
Hopefully you'll get most of your money, but a lot of these folks are invested in the long term prosperity of the region. And so that's what we want. We want to rebuild that. There will be some return generating things, too, to come that we could. That'd be maybe another conversation, but there's really interesting things on that.
I'd be excited to hear that. And I think it's thinking about it as a tax year. So if you're going to grant money, you can 2024 tax year loss. You want to put the money towards the investment pool. Over the next five years, you might be writing a loss for whatever your investment was in that.
Yeah. Hopefully no more than like 10% of your investment hurt.
And this is not financial advice. I don't play that on Twitter. That's right. But. Okay. So I want to respect your time. Let me just quickly read through my notes. There are a couple resources sent to me in email. It was like an individual based best steps. Recommended road. Are these documents public facing? Can I list them on our website for folks to like in the notes from this conversation?
Yes. Yeah. On, like, what to do and where to go.
What to do exactly as a business owner. Okay, cool. So I'm gonna have as much of this distilled as possible for people who listen to the conversation. And then I guess I'll end with one question. And potentially, if you'll indulge as a follow up question, what do you see as the number one concern for small businesses in Asheville and WNC generally. What's the number one concern from where you're looking, man?
I think getting some of the grants, I think getting grant support so that these businesses don't have to take up big loans a lot still have pandemic recovery Covid loans already. So I think that is a real need for us to really have a recovery and not just have to mortgage our future further on that.
And then what do you see as the number one? I'm trying to find the right language for it, but like most hopeful realization over the last two weeks and change. What's leaving you feeling hopeful right now?
Yeah, well, I mean, we are a resilient community and how we've come together, we're already starting to see a lot of progress, which is very heartening. We know there's a long road, so it's the response phase. I think we're doing great. There's going to be a longer term economic recovery. So it's not, you know, I think we got to prepare ourselves. This is going to be one, two, three years of recovery efforts. Especially we think about all the infrastructure stuff. But hey, city of Asheville water, you know, you mentioned, and that's one of the biggest things. And we know we've got that flowing in the pipes again. It's starting to repressurize the system. So we're, that's huge that we're, that we're going to be closer to getting that, you know, up and running again. And I think that'll make a big, big, big difference for us to get some level of getting to where we can really start the recovery, not just as a media kind of response phase going.
Yeah, I'm heartened by the, by the community, by people's ability and willingness to show up and, you know, with strong backs and chainsaws. And then also folks trying to, I would say, push out the horizon line and think about what the future is actually going to look like. And I'm grateful for your time today. I know you have a million conversations need having with business owners in the region. And thank you for making time.
Yeah, thanks, Tony. Appreciate it. Let's keep talking as we move through this process.