Start here if you're looking for grants to start a business. So the best way to find a grant for a small business is to actually start with local programs in either your city or county and every city and county has these special offices that are set up by the elected officials to do 2 things, 1) keep them elected and 2) attract people to start businesses which will make the economy flourish and grow the community and also encourage people who might have been unproductive otherwise to start a business and support themselves
So these websites that they set up are going to be different in every state and you will have to do a little bit of research in order to find them because they don’t spend any money on advertising and this is a GOOD thing because that means 99% of people won’t even be able to find them but I will show you how.
So the first thing I want to mention is all of these sites will end in .org, if any site ends in .com they are probably trying to sell you something so don’t click on it
So just for the purposes of this video lets say you live in Hawaii and you’re looking to start a business there
The first thing you want to do is type in hawaii small business development center into google and bam its the first one that pops up and there’s even one for each island, so you’d click on that and they will help you find loans that are related to your business as well as a ton of other things they do
The next thing you want to do is use good old google to find opportunities and just remember to only click on the ones that end in .org
So for instance, you might type in small business grants hawaii and then see what pops up and you might find opportunities that the last step missed
Type in things that apply to you like for instance if you don’t make much money and are low income type in low income business grants hawaii
There’s even help for felons to start a small business
A great site I found for hawaii is the pacific gateway center . org
Another one I found was htdc.org
On this site there was a $150,000 grant for small businesses to develop a great idea. $150k for an idea! Lol HSBIR application. A lot of these are nonprofits known as excelerator organizations that will give you money because they think your idea will help out the state
The next step after this is to call your elected officials by going to votesmart.org and getting ahold of your congressman and the people they hire to take your calls and asking them to help you with your specific situation and they will do the research for you on what the state is offering in terms of help for small businesses
They do this for a few different reasons but the biggest one is because they know it willl help them get re-elected of course. So its definitely worth it to do this to find out what your state offers and they will even sometimes help you see what is offered nationally.
They have the connections and they know the secret numbers and they can really point you in the right direction so you can figure out what noone else knows which is what is being offered to small businesses right then
The next thing you want to do is check with your local library because they are an amazing resource that is very underutilized and a lot of the time they either know about grants that are available or they will know exactly where to send you to find grants that are available
There are some resources on the sites themselves and if not you can actually ask a librarian and have them do all of the research for you
Libraries have databases that usually cost thousands of dollars of subscriptions per year but it shows all of the private grants given out by non profit organizations and private organizations and they have all of that information available and will do the research for you.
Now after you’ve done all of that we will get to the last step which is to go to your state and federal programs which will be more competitive as more people know about them and are qualified to apply for them. Most people skip the local stuff and start here and that’s not what you want to do. You might be good to go at this point but these are great to apply for as well
A great one here is going to be careeronestop.org which will give you up to $250,000 to train yourself or your employees on how to do stuff like customer service, marketing, sales etc which are all so important for small businesses and these skills don’t come cheap
Another great one here is Nist.gov which they will basically audit your business for free and tell you what you can do in order to increase your sales and cut your costs or other important things like that. Basically free consulting that would normally cost 5 to 10k all for free
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