The JCCC small business development center recently created a website to help small businesses stay afloat.
(John Addessi) “A lot of what we do is cash flow analysis which sounds deadly boring but that’s why most businesses fail, they make enough money it just doesn’t come in when they need it and really estimates are there as many as 80% of businesses that fail, fail just because of just cash flow.”
(Addessi) “We do a bunch of that if you boil it down to a very essence that’s what we do.”
(Addessi) “People come to talk about anything, they are expanding their expanding into international trade they’re trying to grow and figure out when they can hire and how much they can pay and how they’re going to do afford benefits for somebody, a lot of marketing questions, it’s just a lot of questions it’s all over the map every day is different and every client is different.”
(Valerie Reese) “We have classes from everything on how to start a business, that’s our bread and butter we actually ran that class today we have specific classes on taxes, legal advice, trademark and copyright, and QuickBooks is our biggest one we run a lot of QuickBooks classes which is actually teaching students the QuickBooks software.”
It can be intimidating to start a new business, especially in the midst of a pandemic but there is a certain type of entrepreneur that will prevail either way.
(Addessi) “It’s scary to have a business right now where we might lose as many as 20% of small businesses right now because of the slow down we still had a class today of people that were starting them up and we’re not going to lose 20% of them either.”
(Addessi) “It’s not us, they’re the type of business owner that goes and looks for help that would work with us that would seek out resources that would talk to their accountants that would meet with an attorney to make sure they had everything in place those people are going to kick butt even when things are crumbling for some others.”
Supporting these small businesses ensures that the money stays within the community and can have a huge impact on our economy.
(Reese) “I roller-skate and so up until a couple of years ago we didn’t have a roller skate shop anywhere in the metro now we do it’s downtown Kansas City I buy from there all the time I’d rather buy from there than Amazon or anywhere else that’s going to be big name.”
(Reese) “Even if you’re still going to shop online that may not be literally next-door or down the street that’s local, I still buy from other smaller skate shops.”
Even through difficult times, the people who are passionate about their business will continue to reach out to resources like this website.
(Reese) “Overall a lot of our classes have dropped just in volume but definitely not in quality, like the amount of just the ideas that students in our business basics class today had were outrageously cool and they usually are most of the time I chat with the students in the back and I’m like this idea so great.”
(Reese) “The people who are coming are definitely great definitely getting the information that they need and they’re taking what they want and we give it to them, so it’s pretty cool.”
(Addessi) “There’s just so much noise out there and yes 300,000 communications I guess we added to it but we were trying to bring some clarity to the mess with the idea of keeping people employed and keeping this business is going we are not going to lose 20% of our clients not one of us is going to stand for that.”
Reporting from The Campus Ledger, this has been Paige Winters.