Small Business Administration PRIME

ISED works with organizations across the country that foster economic development through the creation and growth of very small businesses.  The organizations provide loans and technical assistance to entrepreneurs in the regions they serve, whether a local community or statewide.

Project Overview

ISED provides consulting services to organizations whose mission is to stimulate enterprise development and small-business-based job creation in the areas they serve. Most frequently, the customers served by these organizations have limited access to financing and individualized advising. Given those challenges, ISED consultants provide technical assistance in areas such as effective loan fund policy and procedures design, risk management, and the creation of successful performance and monitoring systems. Consultants also conduct strategic planning, board training, and organizational assessment. Most recently, growth-oriented organizations are finding it necessary to re-engineer their operations to meet changing economic conditions and adopt the new actions needed to achieve their goals while ensuring sustainability.

Organizational Profile of Beneficiaries

ISED currently works with the Small Business Administration’s Program for Investment in Micro Entrepreneurs (PRIME) to provide training and technical assistance to organizations in order to build their capacity to serve disadvantaged entrepreneurs. ISED identifies the most effective way to broadly share information about best practices and to meet the needs of individual grantee organizations.

Project Activities

Through implementing strategic approaches to the changing market within which enterprise development organizations operate, ISED provides the information and support they need to improve the scope and effectiveness their training, technical assistance and lending programs. Typically, ISED uses the following steps in its service delivery model:

• Identification of the issues/barriers to achievement of maximum service effectiveness and efficiency. ISED designs surveys of grantee organizations to determine the issues or barriers they face in working to achieving maximum effectiveness and efficiency—and thus what assistance will be most valuable to them. The results of the survey allow the ISED team to design training and technical assistance specifically targeted to actual, identified needs.
• Strengthening of organizational knowledge, strategies, and skills. ISED conducts seminars designed to increase organizational capacities. Agendas are based on the specific responses to needs surveys and focus closely on ways to overcome barriers and improve program performance. Participants also present their specific operational problems for feedback from ISED consultants and seminar participants.
• Provision of site-based technical assistance. ISED consultants are available for site visits with organizations who have made a commitment to increasing their capacity. An example of site visit goals might be to help staff to:
  • better assess the lending needs in their market
  • reach and lend to greater numbers of appropriate borrowers
  • better understand risk
  • manage risk prudently, and,
  • assure that the organization has a system of controls in place that helps mitigate loss.
• Follow -on technical assistance. By means of e-mail, phone, conference calls, ISED maintains contact with its grantee customers. It maintains a listserv for purposes of sharing resource materials and tools, program announcements, and industry information.

Upcoming Events

In 2009, ISED presents:

A seminar titled “Dare to Deal” designed to help organizations assess their lending practices in order to accommodate new demand for their loan products and manage risk appropriately. Held in March, 2009, the seminar was open to all PRIME grantees and MicroLoan intermediaries.

Discussion forums will continue the technical assistance and training topics presented at the seminar. Conference call participation will be limited to PRIME grantees and to those intermediaries that attended the seminar. Forums will take place in June.

Period

ISED began work as technical assistance provider to grantees of the SBA PRIME project in October, 2001.

Funder

The Small Business Administration