After a shaky start, the Small Business Development Center serving northern Los Angeles County has made progress in serving business owners and entrepreneurs with counseling, access to financing, and technical assistance. The center recently celebrated bringing $1 million in capital to its service area, exceeding the goal for the year. “That’s exciting for us as we still have six months left in the year,” said director Paul De La Cerda, who joined the center in September. “We are not going to stop at the goal.” The center is hosted by College of the Canyons and operates out of office space at the Santa Clarita Chamber of Commerce. It is funded by the U.S. Small Business Administration and serves the San Fernando, Santa Clarita and Antelope valleys. The center’s rocky start was due to Long Beach City College taking over in January 2006 as the lead agency for the Los Angeles, Ventura and Santa Barbara counties region from the Valley Economic Development Center. A new lead agency meant building up a new infrastructure of partner organizations and getting the word out about the services provided by the center. In the time since De La Cerda became director, the center has reached out to thousands of small businesses owners and entrepreneurs through its programming. Next year he anticipates receiving accreditation from the Association of Small Business Development Centers. De La Cerda is a San Fernando Valley native who started his first business while still in college. He has worked for former Los Angeles Mayor James Hahn and Councilman Greig Smith. Question: So it’s been nearly a year since you were hired. How is it going so far? A: We really hit the ground running. When I got hired the first priority was to look at the mission, vision and values of the program so we could direct it toward having services that can accomplish having a regional approach. I have a service point in Palmdale, a service point in Chatsworth and a service point in Northridge. Q: What are the service points? A: Basically they are space that we have from partners with WorkSource Centers and chambers. Our counselors can meet with clients there in a confidential location and get services out of that point. They don’t have to drive out here (Santa Clarita) to receive services. Our goal is to keep people off the roads and come out to them. Entrepreneurs are busy as it is. Q: After the VEDC stopped being the lead agency and Long Beach took over, there had been two people in the director position before you. A: We had two interim directors. Q: So you’ve brought some stability to the position? A: Right. I’ve had ten months to establish stability and take on a goal that was established for the year to get the ball rolling quicker. We expected to service 2,000 clients in 2006. Q: Did you meet that goal? A: Yes. We surpassed it in fact by 10 percent. That was a great accomplishment for us. We were at 300 clients served approximately when I took over. We had to get the word out and start getting people serviced and trying to find some results in helping businesses. We did some strategic training. We are doing marketing with some chambers. We started getting word out about our free counseling services. All of this is results driven. We are looking to get people heading into the right direction and accomplishing whatever goals they had in their current business or starting that new dream of theirs, whatever that may be. Q: What was this year’s goal? A: This year’s goal was a bit different. It’s more focused on counseling. We have a goal of counseling 600 clients. Within that we are looking to establish long-term relationships with our clients so they can, again, can get specialized, one-on-one counseling with our center. We did 97 training events last year. This year we have concentrated the training toward giving a focused curriculum. We are expected to do 40 training events this year. We will probably do more than that. One thing that we learned was that our entrepreneurs were looking for a support group mechanism; a place they could come and meet and exchange ideas, struggles and triumphs. We started these groups called Mastermind groups. This concept is a weekly event that happens here. We will be starting in Northridge in September in partnership with the North Regional Chamber of Commerce. We launched one in Palmdale two weeks ago. They meet on a weekly basis. There is a topic of discussion facilitated by a professional facilitator. That is where a lot of training is concentrated right now giving opportunity to help each other and at the same time have a professional there to bounce ideas off and keep them thinking about what they have to do next with their business. Q: In your role as director do you get involved much in the counseling or is it just overseeing the whole operation? A: I’ve owned three businesses so I enjoy when there is an opportunity to meet with a client. If there is an area I can help with, I will do that. For instance, government procurement is a specialty of mine. I worked in government for about four years for the city and the mayor’s office. I can help with that. But overall I spend most of my time keeping things running; logistics, payroll, making sure our counselors are paid, making sure the training is being conducted. Conducting meetings with audit review teams that come here from the government, the state and our lead agency. They always want to know we are following regulations and procedures. Q: Where there any unexpected challenges in taking the director position. A: (Laughs) Every day there is a new challenge. And they are great challenges. When you are building a new center like we are we are like a start up ourselves; building a new market base, re-branding ourselves. With that comes a challenge because you are a new center and you have to prove yourself and show success. Being able to have a good track record, being able to show success has been helpful to overcome the roadblocks to having more sponsorship funding coming from others Q: What is it that drives a person to become an entrepreneur and start their own business? Is there a common personality trait you see among your clients? Or is it the age old American dream of wanting to work for themselves? A: There are so many different reasons. I can’t pinpoint just one. But all those things are obvious the American Dream, independence, innovation, the excitement of being in control of your own destiny in a sense that comes with owning a business. That is the initial excitement. We’re here to help people realize the nuts and bolts of running a business; what it really takes to be successful. Seven out of 10 businesses fail in the first year. We are here to hope that the one we are helping that day is not going to be a statistic. You need the excitement but you need the plan and you need to follow the plan. They type of people we see are the survivors; the ones who are going to survive and do what it takes to put everything into it. Q: Are there certain types of businesses you are seeing more of? A: We are seeing a lot of technology businesses. Not unusual because we are advancing every day with technology. We have our service sector here in Santa Clarita restaurants, dry cleaners, the typical staple services we give assistance to as well. We’re seeing more and encouraging activity in the biotech area because we have a lot of resources in Santa Clarita. We’re hoping to see a bigger surge in that area. Q: What are the top two or three management challenges faced by a small business owner? A: The first would be money; cash flow. The second would be planning correctly. Along with that would be time management. Money is always the number one issue. You can’t expect to make money if you don’t make money. It costs to market, it costs to get advice. The great thing about our place is our advice is free. It’s pre-paid by the government, by the taxpayer. They paid into it. They can come back and receive the benefit. They can take advantage of that.
