Amy Chase: Hi and welcome to the 2007 SVA awards in Saint Louis, Missouri. I’m Amy Chase for sbtv.com and we’re here right now with one of the winners tonight, Richard Grote and you are a volunteer with the Veterans Business Resource Center and your one of the award winners. You have won the Veterans Small Business Champion of the year, congratulations.
Richard Grote: Thank you.
Amy Chase: Tell me a little about the word that you’ve done with Veterans is mainly is I guess talking about counseling and talking with veterans about what their opportunities are?
Richard Grote: Right, the Saint Louis Veterans Business resource center is really the first in the country was established with some federal funding from the veterans corporation with supplemented with private funds and what we do is we provide Entrepreneurial services to veterans. So help them develop business plans and in this were all a business strategies.
One of the things we found tough that all of these, what people need, veterans in particular is they need access to capital and know we can—we help them to have access to traditional capital sources like the SVA or like bank loan. Many veterans find have difficulty because they might have fire credit problems say a bank of sales open. So we put together a fund just to 1:10 director to provide loans to veteran small business people who can not otherwise qualified for those who can't qualify for a traditional credit.
And after doing that, we didn’t realize that mostly people also that we’re talking about very small companies, it need some capital. So we’re now developing a new program called Boot-Strap Grant program where we have drop and able to through the generosity of many Saint Louis Corporations and foundations and individuals. We have a program now what we’re going to take a veteran entrepreneurs into a program, get them some training, get them write a business plan and if there is selected to—and complete the program, they’ll receive $5000.00 you know for the distances at the end of the program.
So we’re very excited that we’re providing education, training, mentoring and access to capital for veterans.
Amy Chase: What are some of the special skills or talents that you think veterans bring to the table when they began to look at becoming an entrepreneur?
Richard Grote: Well, the things we’ve noticed the most are the willingness to work very hard, some good organizational skills and a some real discipline to carry through one project. So once they begin a project, they’re more likely to carry to the completion we filed.
Amy Chase: Yeah, obviously now, we’re fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, at some point we’re going to be having a lot of soldiers and military people coming back to this country. Do you see a need to have more resources available for them when they come back?
Richard Grote: Yeah, definitely there’s a major need and our real goal is there’s o much federal money available for different projects and we’ve taken—what we’ve done is we’ve taken some government seed money and with the use, we have to create programs behind which the private sector can get excited. So by like or our Boot-Strap Grant program, we’re going to be able to show how a small amount of money, $5,000.00 can actually change the person’s lives and enable them to develop a business and move forward. So we think that a lot more money is going to be needed a lot more services are going to be needed. But I think wealth placed federal money will bring out the private support, which we think 3:17 for all these troops.
Amy Chase: Well—
Richard Grote: Well, I guess there's some people you meet. You meet a number of people in different types of fields to get some ideas as to how you can move forward and hopefully, you’ve got a few converts is to and might—other thing I’m most interested in is pushing ideas especially with the small business administration. To make more funds available, pilot-type funds like this that can generate to private support that can take it to a much larger level than a federal government fund scam by themselves.
Amy Chase: Great and again, thank you Mr. Grote. He is the small business champion of the year for veterans and we are here at the 2007 SVA awards in Saint Louis. There’s much more coverage here on sbtv.com where small business is our only business.
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