Federal grant helps IEDC expand minority services to small businesses

Tiffany Stokes started her small phlebotomy and EKG training school in 2001, but it was only recently that she learned what it meant to be a certified minority-owned business.

With the help of the Indiana Small Business Development Center, she received her certification and made a bid for a state contract to provide services through Indiana State University.

Her Gifted Hands Academy in Hammond didn’t win the contract, but she said she learned a lot along the way and believes the certification will help her land contracts in the future.

With the development center’s help, she said, she “knew how to do the statements, the request for proposals, and everything else. That’s really helped me.”

Helping clients secure such certifications is just one way the Indiana Economic Development Corp.’s small business center is expanding services to help diverse clients through $2 million in new funding.

The agency last year received $1.6 million from the federal Minority Business Development Agency and added $400,000 in matching funds. Clients obtain the various state and local certifications they need to compete for government and corporate contracts set aside for minority-owned businesses. The small business center also helps businesses become certified as women- or veteran-owned through other funding and programs.

“It provides them with access to this portion of the supply chain by verifying that they are, in fact, owned by eligible minorities, women or veterans,” said Joanne Tica, specialty business adviser for the Indiana Small Business Development Center. “It enables them to introduce their business to buyers, via set-asides, who might not normally notice them, allowing them to compete with larger businesses.”

For instance, the federal government last year awarded $62.4 billion in contracts to certified minority- owned businesses.

Tica was doing certification coaching before the grant money arrived, but she’s doing a lot more of it now. She started out working in northwestern Indiana, doing “boot camps” and workshops for minority-, women- and vet-owned businesses about the opportunities that landing various forms of certification could open up.

“I think we had some successes with that, so we’ve expanded it to the rest of the state,” she said. “I’m doing more work right now with that.”

The small business center is a partnership between the IEDC and the U.S. Small Business Administration to provide technical assistance to Indiana small businesses and potential small businesses so they can get started and expand. The IEDC learned last fall that it had received the $1.6 million minority business grant.

“We have started spending some of those funds primarily on certification assistance programs,” said David Watkins, senior vice president of entrepreneurship and small businesses for the IEDC. “Through the [small business development center], we’re sitting down with businesses one-on-one across the state and helping them do some strategic planning around what certifications would be best for their businesses and how those certifications could help them grow, increase sales, and secure not just government contracts but also corporate contracts.”

The project would also help them work through the rather complex and onerous certification paperwork. The small business center focuses on teaching about and obtaining state and local certifications. But that’s not the end of the story.

“Since we’re an Indiana organization, that’s where we focus, but there are also private certifying agencies, which are more for corporate opportunities,” Tica said.

Those opportunities involve an alphabet soup of state, local, private and national agencies, ranging from the WOSB (Women-Owned Small Business federal contract program) to HUBZone, a federal program that creates an approximately 3% set-aside for federal funds used to revive historically underused business zones.

“We educate and give people opportunities to ask questions,” Tica said. “We get a lot of referrals from people who have heard about the program or the support it offers from someone else.”

She said she’s had about 80 calls, emails or other inquiries from Indiana companies interested in learning more. The IEDC and the small business center aren’t the only state agencies offering guidance in this area.

“We have a bunch of different organizations that provide certifications,” Watkins said. “There are a bunch of different types and flavors here in Indiana. The Indiana Department of Administration [via its Division of Supplier Diversity] manages state certifications. However, there are also federal certification programs and private-sector certifications. The city of Indianapolis has certification programs as well.”

The ultimate goal of all these programs is to allow certified minority-owned businesses to gain a toehold with large companies or government entities by taking a relatively small portion of a particular job.

“It’s very hard for a small business to get in front of a large corporation, or in front of a state agency, without having some kind of credentials,” Tica said. “Certification does provide at least the entry point for credentials to say, ‘Hey, I’m out here. Maybe I can’t do an entire contract for Eli Lilly, but I can do a portion of it.’”

Certification assistance isn’t the only use the IEDC plans for the minority business grant. It’s already engaged with several of the partner organizations it worked with to obtain the money, including Indiana Black Expo and its Black Business Training Institute, to develop other ways to help.

“We have an existing partnership with Indiana Black Expo for their training program,” Watkins said. “We have a … business adviser embedded within that program. So we’re exploring ways that we can continue to scale and grow that program across the state.

“We also want to continue to grow our outreach efforts so that folks from our team can go out across the state and spread the word, like we already are with the outreach around certification. Only in this case, we want to do it with related things, like help with international sales and getting access to capital.”

He said the IEDC will measure the success of its efforts based on the number of businesses it’s able to assist and the economic impact of those efforts.

“If we’re able to assist more minority businesses than we did before we secured this funding, then that’s certainly a success,” Watkins said. “But we’re also looking at things like increased sales, revenue growth, job growth, new contracts awarded and new foreign markets that have been entered because of the work that we’ve been able to do through this program.”•