Brooklyn Small Business Owners Frustrated Over SBA Loan Process

BROOKLYN, NY — When Natasha Amott became a small-business owner in 2008 after leaving the world of non-profits and economic development, she entered entrepreneurship with the goal of being a customer-friendly kitchen store that served its neighbors well. Her business, Whisk, would be a place where her staff would have genuine conversations with clients about their specific needs.

In the midst of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, however, Amott now faces a new reality. In the past month, she has furloughed five employees and now works with a mainly part-time staff of four. The group's work now consists of filling internet orders while Amott grapples with the stressful process of how to keep her business going while facing a very uncertain future. Despite long days and short nights, Amott – who has gone from locations in Williamsburg and Manhattan down to her Atlantic Ave. storefront in the past year – is determined to keep going.

“I told our staff, ‘I want to preserve our lifeline,’” Amott told Patch on Wednesday. “There’s kind this imperative for me that we can keep serving the community. But on the other hand, it’s like, how do we do that?”

She added: “I don’t want to be running an internet business. I chose to be an entrepreneur because I felt like I wanted to be part of a community and I wanted to do something for myself.”

Amott is not alone in her small-business struggles. This week, the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce released the results of a survey that showed that most small businesses across Brooklyn have not received financial help from federally funded $350 million (and since emptied) Payroll Protection Program. According to the survey, of the 336 local businesses that include hospitality, retail, manufacturing, health, technology and professional services, 84 percent had not received federal financial assistance as of April 17 while 90 percent businesses that are owned by minorities or women did not receive loans.

The survey results verify much of the information chamber CEO Randy Peers said he and his staff have been receiving over the past month. As difficult as the data is for Peers to digest, hearing the stories of the difficulties business-owners are experiencing is even more disheartening.

“It’s a lot of frustration,” Peers told Patch this week. “Brooklyn is a small business economy and the businesses we’re talking about are the heart and soul of our neighborhoods and they’re really in a tough situation.”

Amott has cobbled together the best survival plan she can, which now centers around an e-commerce system that once represented only a miniscule part of Whisk’s overall business. Between the long hours she devotes to her business and a busy home life that includes three children and a husband who is also involved in business ownership, Amott is teetering on burnout.

Peers said there is a spectrum of frustration business owners have experienced. Whether it being banks that didn’t participate in the program and never passed along loan applications or applicants who were told that they could not apply because they did not have existing loans or lines of credit or who applied for PPP loans and were rejected or never heard back, the angst among business owners runs a gamut, including a lack of transparency on the bank’s part, Amott said.

Amott is among those who found difficulty working with banks trying to secure funding. In Amott’s case, HSBC, was among the banks that have failed small business owners in regard to the loan process itself or about the status of loan applications. Amott, who began to feel nervous about her hopes for loan funding last week, found herself elevating the level of conversations she was with a banker with whom she has a good working relationship as news that PPP funds were running low.

Even as an active participant in the process, Amott was told that, despite getting her application in within 24 hours of the PPP fund being announced, she did not receive funding even after being told in an email last Wednesday that her loan would be approved.

Amott now finds herself attempting to be among the first in line for a second round of PPP funding. Still, Amott, who says she now gets anywhere from 4-6 hours of sleep on a good night, remains frustrated. She says if her current reality remains in place for too long, she fears whether she will have the mental stamina to keep going.

“All of us small-business owners are working a bazillion hours right now,” she said. “So to also have the time to do all this pestering (about loan applications)…it’s just really unfortunate that this is how we’re having to spend so much of our time.”

Stories like Amott’s are commonplace for Peers and others at the Brooklyn chamber.

While lawmakers have proposed a second round of PPP loan funding that could bring an additional $300 million, Peers feels as if the efforts need to be stronger if local businesses like those in Brooklyn are to see a benefit. Congress is also expected to appropriate more funds to the Economic Injury Disaster Loan, but with both programs, parameters for qualifying for both federal programs may not change, which Peers said puts small business owners in a difficult spot.

“At the end of the day, what hasn’t changed is that all of these businesses are struggling, all of them need support and all of them are at-risk of closing permanently,” Peers said. “If we don’t figure out a way to help them out, our neighborhoods are going to look very, very different on the back end of this.”

Peers said with New York still in the midst of the coronavirus crisis, not having an end date to when some level of normalcy can be expected remains an obstacle, especially among the small-business community. With that uncertainty hanging over their heads, small businesses, Peers said, are hesitant to take on loans or debt that – without some assistance – may be difficult to pay back if the pandemic continues to impact local businesses.

Peers said a possible solution would be wage subsidy programs, similar to the ones that were put in place after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and that reimbursed business owners for bringing employees back to work. If something isn’t done in the coming months, however, Peers said the damage could be long-term.

“It’s stressful, it’s heart-breaking, it’s emotional (to hear stories),” he said. “I just really worry that things are going to be very, very different when we get out of this.”

This article originally appeared on the Brooklyn Patch