Karen Mills Quotes
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I recently had the opportunity to participate in Inc.'s first-ever 'Hire Power Awards' event in Washington, D.C. The event was a testament to the power of American entrepreneurship and the role that it plays in driving job creation and innovation in a wide array of industries.
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We spend a great deal of our energy making sure that small businesses have help in navigating to the outcomes that they want.
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The morale when I came in was not the best. It was because the agency had not been valued.
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The 2009 stimulus law got the ball rolling, allowing the agency to reduce and eliminate fees and raise loan guarantees to 90 percent of the total. I knew that we had the opportunity to use S.B.A. products to fill that gap in a rapid manner, as we ended up doing in the Recovery Act.
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In October 2008, when the credit crunch hit, small businesses were really crushed by the lack of capital.
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Small businesses, you can give them capital, but what they often need as much is mentoring, advice and help with their business plan.
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My family was in two businesses - they were in the textile business, and they were in the candy business. The conversations around the dinner table were all about the factory floor and how many machines were running and what was happening in the business. I grew up very engaged in manufacturing and as part of a family business.
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As you probably know, half of the people who work in this country work for small businesses. And it's more than that, because two out of every three net new jobs come from small business. So we mean it when we talk about small business being the engine for the economy.
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We are very much engaged across the government, very much engaged in streamlining and simplifying our activities with borrowers and lenders, because that saves time and saves costs and we believe we can do that while maintaining the same or increased levels of oversight and risk management.
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This has always been a small agency with a big mission. But these days, especially, we have to stand up every day, deliver value into the hands of small-business owners and get taxpayers the biggest bang for their buck so that we can help these job creators do what they need to do.
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Among our responsibilities is to make sure that 23 percent of all government contracts go to small businesses. That's about $150 billion annually, from all the government agencies.
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I haven't checked this out yet, but one of our guys told me we have a counselor within 45 minutes to an hour of most small businesses in this country. That's really powerful. I call it our bone structure.
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We've gotten tremendous support. Everybody now understands how critical it is to help small businesses get out of this recession and into recovery.