My dad and mom grew up in Bakersfield. Actually, my grandmother ran a magnificence store on South Hayes Road for a few years. I nonetheless have a lot of household right here and I really feel a deep connection to your metropolis. That’s why I’m so excited to have a weeklong go to whereas attending the Bakersfield version of the California Financial Summit, hosted by California Ahead. Whereas I’m right here, I’ll meet as many native small-business homeowners as I can and get a really feel for a way Foremost Road is faring in my household’s hometown.
I’m right here to symbolize the California Workplace of the Small Enterprise Advocate, which helps financial development and innovation by offering our state’s small companies and entrepreneurs with the data, instruments and assets they should begin, handle and develop profitable and resilient companies. I’ll be attending a number of occasions, together with a panel on power, local weather, neighborhood resilience and financial mobility organized by the Kern Group Faculty District. On the summit on Thursday, I’ll be asserting a brand new effort from my workplace, the 2022 Entrepreneurship & Financial Mobility Process Drive.
My workplace’s message to each small-business proprietor I meet this week: Your financial restoration is California’s financial restoration.
With 4.2 million small companies, California has the biggest small-business sector within the nation. They rent almost half our state’s workforce. Serving to these companies to start out, scale and thrive is the rationale CalOSBA was created.
Aside from Hawaii and the territories, our state has probably the most various small-business sector within the nation; almost 45 p.c of our small companies are owned by Hispanics or racial minorities.
However that is additionally the place the story will get extra difficult: Solely 13 p.c of those 1.9 million Hispanic- or minority-owned companies have achieved the objective of hiring workers.
That is why, when Gov. Gavin Newsom describes his imaginative and prescient of a “California for All,” I take into consideration what CalOSBA can do to assist these companies develop and create extra jobs that help area people.
On the California Ahead summit, I’ll be diving into contemporary concepts with native practitioners and neighborhood leaders on the way to implement three massive targets that the Entrepreneurship and Financial Mobility Process Drive can be specializing in:
Democratizing entry to capital. One of many the reason why so many women- and minority-owned companies can’t scale giant sufficient to rent workers is as a result of they don’t have equitable entry to capital. We should give you profitable methods to “loosen the credit score field.” California’s technical help community of greater than 100 small-business facilities — together with the Cal State Bakersfield Small Enterprise Improvement Heart and Kern Girls’s Enterprise Heart — are there to assist companies from underserved enterprise communities get loan-ready. However we want extra artistic methods to make enterprise financing equitable.
Diversifying the innovation economic system. California’s domination of the high-tech startup house remains to be plain, however largely concentrated within the San Francisco Bay Space and Los Angeles. My workplace’s Speed up California program is funding a community of Inclusive Innovation Hubs to diversify innovation, throughout ZIP codes and backgrounds, and when it comes to trade and expertise sectors. That’s why the KCCD panel this week will delve into clear economic system alternatives for Kern County.
Driving financial mobility by way of entrepreneurship. That is what it’s all about for me — ensuring that small-business possession can create generational wealth for households that pursue it and, in flip, cut back the racial wealth hole. We want a better proportion of small companies that may rent workers, enable the homeowners to purchase a house, ship their youngsters to school and go away a strong succession plan once they’re able to retire.
That’s the dream behind each storefront, both on Foremost Road or on-line. I’m excited to listen to in regards to the massive, progressive goals being cooked up in Kern County and to study out of your neighborhood this week about the way to assist them come true.