Vivian:
So today's episode is going to be one that we are hoping is going to lead you guys to take action. We all know that last week there were a ton of states here in the Southeast that were just absolutely devastated by Hurricane Helene. So what we're hoping to do is we want to provide actionable resources that you guys can reach out to or consider if you're wanting to help fellow small business owners out. I think a lot of times it often feels so massive and you're like, I'm just one person, what can I do? There are so many things that we can do from the comfort of our home to help people whose livelihood and homes have been destroyed. so Chelsea, I know we've done a lot of research and we have some really great resources. We're hoping that you will share this episode with other small business owners so that way we can just team up and help each other out.
Chelsea:
Absolutely. There are so many ways out there that you can help individuals as well. We are specifically a podcast for small business owners, so we are focusing on ways that small business owners can look for resources or for ways that you can donate or help a small business owner in need. So we are focusing on that. Of course, there are many other ways that you can help individuals.
Vivian:
Yeah, and if you guys feel compelled to, if you're listening to us on Spotify or on YouTube, whatever, go ahead and drop a comment. If you know of another resource that we didn't mention or that we're not mentioning today, because we do think that it's important to spread the word. Also, there's only so much that Chelsea and I can research in a short amount of time. We've picked some of the ones that we think are heavy hitters and will go directly to the small business business owners, but we're always open to providing more resources. So drop it in the comments.
Chelsea:
Okay, so the first resource that we're going to talk about is of course from the US Small Business Administration, SBA, and they have disaster loans. So they have Business Physical Disaster loans, which are going to be specifically to help small businesses repair or replace damaged property.
They also have the Economic Injury Disaster loan, which is working capital loans for small businesses. I want to say, remember guys, these are loans. These are not grants. I know Vivian, that you wanted to talk about this as well.
Vivian:
Yeah, the asterisks here that I just want to remind you guys of, because when I was researching this as well, I did find that a lot of the local towns were posting local resources to help small businesses, they were sharing basically how to submit an application for a loan.
Do not confuse these with the grants. The grants are the money that you don't have to pay back. The loans are going to be the ones that you have to pay back. Maybe they're offering a super low interest rate or maybe they're offering a no interest rate, which you want to ask these questions before you submit your application, but for some of them, I was also saying that they do take into account your financial history. So just be aware of that going into it. Anytime you see a loan, you guys know that you're on the hook for repaying that money back.
The reason I wanted to bring it up is not because I don't think small business owners are not smart and they don't know this. I think when people are in stressful situations and their mind is somewhere else, right? They're thinking about the immediate need that they have day to day. They may not be as focused on the small details and may commit to something that seems like a good idea at the time. Then over time they're like, I really wish I hadn't done that.
Chelsea:
Also really important to consider when looking at loans, are they short term or long term? That means when are you going to be on the hook and have to pay it back? Short term, of course, means you have a shorter amount of time to raise that capital again and give it back to them. Long term is going to be you have some time, some space before you're going to have to pay them back.
Vivian:
Now Chelsea, I know there was another loan. You mentioned the first one was going to be the US Business Administration's offering the Business Physical Disaster loans and Economic Injury Disaster loans. What other type of loan is there?
Chelsea:
So another one that I've been seeing a lot that has been spread around as a resource for Hurricane Helene is FloridaCommerce is right now offering a Florida Small Business Emergency Bridge Loan.
These are short-term, zero interest working capital loans. Now again, remember short-term means you're going to have to pay them back within a shorter amount of time. With these loans you can get up to $50,000 per eligible applicant. I want to say before we go any further, we will be adding the links to all of these so you can find the information and do a deeper dive into each one of these if it's something that you are considering.
Vivian:
As far as grants are concerned, what did you find out there?
Chelsea:
Okay, so specifically for grants, you first want to check the US Business Grants website. It's designed specifically to help small businesses find grants for their specific needs, for whatever niche you are in, so for minorities, women-owned businesses, that sort of thing. It is, again, kind of like a database. Just go on there and look through to see what you can find.
There is also the Disaster Assistance Website, which is also an official government website. It is designed again to help those in need during disasters and it will list loans, grants, services and programs. Any type of support you might need or you might be looking for after a disaster.
Also looking at, and this goes for whenever there's a disaster, your local government. Specifically for Hurricane Helene, this really hurt the South. So looking at your local government's websites, looking at your state government websites. So the South Carolina Department of Commerce has created a page specifically about hurricane season and resources to help small businesses during this hurricane season. We do get a lot of hurricanes here in the South. Do they necessarily have such a big impact like Hurricane Helene? Thank God, no. There's still times where it's hard to get through hurricane season.
Vivian:
I think that's a great tip that you have though. I think a lot of times we always kind of look for the federal help, right? That's the first thing that comes to mind, but we forget that there can be opportunities where our local government, so let's say if you live in the town of Greenville, check the town of Greenville's or the city of Greenville's website.
Chelsea:
Yes, absolutely. One Spartanburg Inc. They are not government, but they are a business in the Spartanburg area, and they are offering local support to help businesses restore local business operations or finding a service provider. Their website has a specific list that tells people, these are the employees to contact if you need help with this specific thing. So you can go check that out. Again, we'll be adding all the links.
Vivian:
I think if you're also someone who's not in the affected area but you're wanting to help, going in and checking one some of those towns that you may know were in the path of Hurricane Helene will help tremendously because as we said, they're listing out the local resources for the small businesses, but they also give you an opportunity to help with the recovery.
So take for example, one of the things that we're doing, Chelsea and I, is through The Seasoned Marketer. You may remember we launched a fun community called the SOB Community. That community is a monthly membership that is $50 a month and it provides you, the small business owner, with monthly marketing support. With that, what we decided to do is I was on Instagram and I saw that there was a town specifically called Lansing, North Carolina in Western North Carolina that had been hit really, really hard. Basically their small businesses that were on that main street part of their town were just washed away. They were under so much water, and so now they're having to rebuild from scratch. So what we've decided to do as our contribution, as small business owners, is to actually donate 100 % of the proceeds for anybody that joins our monthly membership in October to four of the local businesses. We're doing that through their GoFundMe's, and I've vetted those GoFundMe's. They are going directly to the small business owner. There is no in-between organization that's dispersing the funds. So if you're a small business owner that wants to assist and you're not looking for yourself, still consider going to these town or city websites for a town or city that you know was in the affected path. That way you can come up with ideas on how you can contribute and just help a fellow small business owner out there.
Chelsea:
Yes, absolutely. What I just listed were all of the resources specifically for small business owners who are looking for them now. We're going to now talk about the ways you can donate or help. So I'm so glad you segued that perfectly. I don't think you meant to do that, but I'm going to say that you did.
Vivian:
Things just happen so naturally!
Chelsea:
Well, I'm glad you brought up local communities because one of the ways that people can donate that I'm going to bring up is downtown Spruce Pine. That is a city that was absolutely devastated by Helene. I mean, most of it's been washed away. The local government is raising funds specifically for the downtown businesses so that they can rebuild and stay open.
So if you go to their website, you can donate through PayPal. There's more information on their website. All of the things that we are going to list on ways that you can help, we have vetted, I have vetted. I've checked to make sure that they're legit there. So that's definitely one way you can consider helping.
There's also the Craft Emergency Relief Fund, which I had not heard about, but it's actually a great program. If you are a crafter, an artist, definitely go check it out. They've been active for the past 40 years and this group works to help crafters and artists during emergencies and disasters because, these are the people that give us life, they make life interesting, but they're also the first ones to get really hit when something like this happens. So you can support them through donations. They have multiple donation options. You can also go to their website to find and apply for loans and grants. So it is great if you are a crafter or artist looking for help, go check out their website. If you're someone who wants to help that community, go check out their website.
Vivian:
Chelsea, I also want to mention too, the most obvious, which is GoFundMe. The reason that I want to bring this up is, as I mentioned with what we're contributing and doing through the SOB community, where we're going to donate 100 % of the proceeds to those four GoFundMe's for the local businesses in Lansing, North Carolina. When I went on to GoFundMe, there are a couple of things I want to mention. For one, you want to be sure that you're looking at who the organizer is for a GoFundMe page and who the person is that's receiving the funds. All right. Sometimes people; friends, family members will actually create the GoFundMe and they themselves will be the ones getting the funds and then dispersing it or helping the other person. You want to be sure that the two match up, right? So you want that the person who's going to be receiving the funds is going to be the small business owner or the small business that you're wanting it to go to.
Additionally, GoFundMe has done this cool thing where they have created a global Hurricane Helene GoFundMe. If you go on there, it's going to have all of the GoFundMe's that's been set up to go to someone that's been affected by this disaster.
The other thing is you can use the filter on there and I highly recommend that you do because they have a filter specifically for businesses. So when I went on there and then I filtered it by small business, it pulled up all of the ones that were set up for a small business.
I think if you're wanting to get really granular and the reason I say this y'all is because perhaps you've already done the donations of the non-perishable items. You've already collected paper towels and toilet paper and have sent water and have put canned goods together, and you're like, I feel like I can do more though. I think this is a great way to do that is to go to the GoFundMe under Hurricane Helene page and then use that business filter. That way you can see who directly it's impacted and what they're needing for some of them. For example, the four businesses that we chose, they're looking for a hundred thousand dollars because they need that in order to just get their business cleaned up, reset, get new equipment, get new product so that they can reopen and restart their livelihood. If they don't have that money available to them, they're going to be in a real pickle to try to reopen.
Chelsea:
There is a brewery in Asheville (New Origin Brewery) that was completely wiped away, washed away. A train actually got carried by the water and thrown into the brewery. It's gone. I was reading that because of city code and stuff like that, they cannot rebuild the building the way that it once was. So they're like, we have no idea what we're gonna do because we can't reopen. We have all of these business loans that now we have no way to pay back. I don't remember if they said they had a plan or what they were trying to figure out to do, but we will add that in the show notes.
This is going to be like a really strange pivot. I want to say, y'all, please, when you are looking for ways to help, do not say, I'm just going to go up to the south wherever they are, and I'm going to drive up there and help them physically. Don't do that. That's not what they need. They have hands on deck. That's probably more dangerous than anything because a lot of these structures are now unstable. Do not drive up there.
Vivian:
Yeah, I encourage everybody to be smart about how they're sending resources and also contributing their time. But you are correct. I had read somewhere that there are some roads that are going to be indefinitely closed until they're able to go back in and rebuild or maybe restructure them. So it is important to note that maybe the best way that you can help somebody is by finding where you want your resources to go to and then contributing that way monetarily or through a donation. I will say, not to bring up our SOB community again, but I truly do think it's a win-win for both parties. For one, if you sign up for our community this month, when we say a hundred percent of the proceeds are going to them, that means that $48 and 25 cents on your behalf is going to be donated to one of the four small businesses that we've selected. We actually have those listed on our Instagram right now. So if you're not able to send $100, $200, but you can join a community and then have 48 of those dollars go to the business. I think that's a pretty big contribution compared to maybe donating five bucks.
Chelsea:
Absolutely. I also found Daily Coffee News has created a page specifically dedicated to sharing how people can support small business coffee shops that have been devastated by Helene, which, everyone runs on coffee, right? Well, I don't drink coffee, but to everyone else coffee is really important, right? So they have an entire list of GoFundMe's they have for specific coffee small businesses. They have examples of ways bigger coffee brands are contributing. All that stuff. It's really great information. So go check that out too. Also secondly, I forgot to bring this up earlier, but the IRS has announced that they are going to have disaster tax relief for those impacted by Helene.
Vivian:
I think that's going to be similar to if you guys were a small business owner during COVID-19, you remember that there were certain criteria that you could meet as a small business owner for them to give you a COVID-19 disaster relief fund or grant money. So just be sure that even if you're not the one that's had their small business devastated by this, you guys help a fellow small business owner out, just share this information. If you go onto the IRS website and when they get that information out there, be sure that you're copying and pasting that link and sending it to a small business owner that you know could benefit from it. You would not believe the amount of times during COVID-19, it was a very popular thing they were doing. Like a ton of businesses were applying and signing up for it, but there were so many other businesses that had no clue. So never assume that somebody knows they have a resource available to them. If you know about it and you know they may fit the criteria and you want to share that with them, then go ahead and ping them on Instagram, right? Send them a message and say, hey, I just wanted to be sure that you saw this, it might be useful.
Chelsea:
Absolutely. That's why we also ask, if you're listening on Spotify or if you're on YouTube and you have a resource, leave it in the comments. If you have a place where people can send donations or send money, leave that in the comments. Send us a DM. If you're not on Spotify or YouTube, but you think of something, send us a DM and we will share it on our page.
Vivian:
Chelsea, I think we have a really great opportunity to be able to put all of this into a document and just have it available for people. Be on the lookout for that. We'll do something like if you go to TheSeasonedMarketer.com/H E L E N E you'll be able to download that. Even if it's not for you, you can download it and send it to somebody that it can help out.
Chelsea:
We're going to try to keep that updated. So as soon as we have other resources, we'll update it so that you can get all the information.
Vivian:
Let me go ahead and add another one, Chelsea. This one is Samaritan's Purse. Shout out to my friend Ashley, who submitted this on our Instagram stories because we did put a feeler out there and we wanted you guys to share any of the good resources that you had seen. Samaritan's Purse, for those of you that do not know, is a worldwide organization that is Christian-based, non-denominational.
What they're doing is if you click on their website for Hurricane Helene response, you're able to go in and find specific initiatives that they're doing. They are a really great 501c3 that you can donate money to and rest assured that they're going to be using the money to help the small businesses that have been affected. I think they're also doing some other relief programs, they were taking food and water and all that good stuff. As we kind of get through this week by week I think they're going to pivot more so into trying to rebuild and recover some of what was devastated in these towns.
Part of the reason that we chose to have an entire episode dedicated to these organizations and opportunities for people to donate is because a lot at the beginning, there was a lot of press around the places in Florida, because obviously everybody knows that when a hurricane comes, Florida is just always smack dab in the middle of it. And that was the case. They were devastated.
However, this hurricane was a little different in the sense that it reached communities that are not used to getting hit by hurricanes. Western North Carolina is not used to getting hit by a hurricane. What ended up happening was a lot of that weather, it impacts these mountain towns, you're talking about mudslides and you're talking about all of this other catastrophic stuff where it just kind of set off these dominoes.
People without power for a really long time that were not prepared because they are not used to getting hurricanes. It's different when we live in South Carolina, we're near the coast. We're close to Charleston. We know what to do, and even still people don't do it, but we know what to do. That's why people have generators in case the power goes off for an elongated period of time.
Chelsea:
I'm not gonna lie, I don't do it. We do have a generator. Tim is prepared. I'm not. I'm just here for the ride. Sorry.
Vivian:
Yeah. We've always said that when the apocalypse happens, Chelsea's going to get left behind. She's going to be the first person that we eat because she's not going be able to survive the apocalypse.
But so my, my point in saying all that is, f you're wondering why the devastation was so harsh, it was the weather. It was the fact that people were not prepared because they just didn't know any better. Also I think there just wasn't a whole lot of time to prepare people for it.
Let me tell you a weird experience that we had. So Alex and I, my husband and I were driving. We were in Alabama and we were driving back home on Saturday night. This was after the hurricane. So it was about 10 o'clock when we were driving through North Augusta.
North Augusta y'all is in South Carolina and it got really eerie because we knew something was up. We just didn't know exactly what was up. There was this eerie feeling. So we're driving and suddenly I say to him, does it look particularly dark? He's like, yeah, I have not seen lights on for miles now. Then we started to notice the billboards that usually are lit up at night, those lights were off. There were no lights for off ramp exits where usually you'll see a big gas station, no lights, miles and miles. Then we started to see an increasing number of cars on the side of the road. He's like, why are there so many cars on the side of the road? Then we started to put two and two together. We got an alert on our phone that said they were under a curfew and they advised everyone to stay home. Florida got hit. We heard about that. We heard a lot about Asheville. We did not hear anything about North Augusta. We did not hear anything about upper South Carolina, right? There were towns that, I think Spartanburg was hit as well. There were quite a few towns that were hit there. Come to find out North Augusta has not had power for days and days and days now. So the cars on the side of the road were people that had run out of gas because they had not gotten gas on the other side of Atlanta, which luckily we did. Otherwise we would have been joining them on the side of the road.
There has been so much media attention on some of these towns and not to say that that's bad. Those are the people that were hit hard and we want everybody to get help. We're hoping you guys will go out there, check them out so that you're able to spread the love and to help some of the other communities that really aren't near Asheville but need just as much help.
Chelsea:
Y'all. You don't have to do a lot. You could also just do a call to action. So putting out your feelers saying to all your Facebook followers or Instagram followers. Asking all of your community, "hey, what small businesses can we support? Do you know of any resources? Here are all the resources I know about. If anyone else is interested, let's just share the information."
Vivian:
Yeah, I think that's a really great way to do it. I can tell you that here locally, one of my coworkers, she's just got such a big heart and she actually had a house in Hendersonville too, that was, affected by it. The second they knew that there was stuff they could contribute, they actually just went on Facebook and were like, hey, there's a need up there. We know the local sheriff. Here's what they're needing. They've asked for bread, they've asked for X, Y, and Z. She was able just through her friends to pull stuff together and then have one car take it all up there. We have so many connections now on Facebook, there is a way for you just to throw it out there and just say, hey, do you guys know any small business owners that are needing help right now because of Hurricane Helene? How can we help? That way you can rally the troops or just you make that contribution yourself. So if you're not doing it through one of these other awesome resources that we found out there, if nothing else, just go to your friends and family and ask if they know of anybody that can use a contribution or can use some support right now.
If nothing else, if you guys just make the commitment to join our SOB community this month, we are doing this till the very end of October. Every single member that joins, you get instant access to our library of short marketing tutorials. You get access to weekly zoom calls with Chelsea and I in the community, and on top of it, you get access to a resource database that we've put together.
Join our community this month and we'll contribute as a member your $48.25 to one of those four Lansing, North Carolina businesses that we found. If you guys want to see the list, just hit us up and we'll send it over to you. We also have it on Instagram in one of our reels.
Chelsea:
Okay y'all, so we are the SOB community. There is power in community. Let's go out there and help as many people as we can. So use these resources, share these resources, and go be the best SOB you can be.