How PeopleFund is filling gaps for small businesses in North Texas

Holly Burrow was a trained pastry chef by trade and ran a number of her own small businesses.

Now she helps guide small business owners and entrepreneurs through her work as economic development officer for Community Development Financial Institution PeopleFund’s North Texas region

She spoke with the Dallas Business Journal about where CDFIs fit in North Texas’ busy business banking landscape and how she’s trying to include more types of business owners into her work.

I wanted to talk to you about where and how CDFIs like PeopleFund fall into the crowded business banking market in North Texas.

Well, small business is big business here, honestly.

We serve so many people, and it is actually really cool to be in this role because when I was in business for myself, this particular role and CDFIs were something that I absolutely knew nothing about. I didn’t know they existed. Even when I was looking for help as a small business owner, it just didn’t percolate to the top and find me when I needed it.

I have definitely seen this role as an opportunity to sort of pass the note to everyone that I meet about this really cool thing that it seems nobody knows about.

Everybody knows about things like the DEQ and SBDCs and some of these bigger organizations that have really fantastic resources, but they’re also for a really specific purpose.

Where we have come into that mixture is that we fill in gaps.

What specifically makes People Fund unique?

As a lender, we have a fully human underwriting process. We are not automated. We don’t use any computer systems or algorithms or anything of that nature to push people through a system — which I understand the functionality of, absolutely.

But because, like I said, we fill in the gaps, what having a human system allows for, is us to balance things.

So, maybe you’ve had a bump in the road and your personal credit is not quite where we would dream it up to be to give you a business loan. But you’ve worked amazingly hard and you’ve built a really strong business plan. Your financials are really phenomenal, and you’ve knocked it out of the park and you’ve designed a business that is a really solid plan.

It allows for a little bit more human aspect to that judgment, instead of running through an algorithm where if your credit score is below 700, we can’t work with you.

For us, we can work with you if you’re a little bit lower on that scale. But it means that you have to prove to us that you’ve learned and grown and done other things along the way. But it allows for people to grow and change and be in that process instead of (requiring them to) already be on the other side.

That’s interesting because sometimes I talk with small business that say, ‘my credit is kind of bad because I have been funding this myself this whole time and I’m trying to make ends meet.’

Something else that’s really cool — when we look at lending, we do something called owner equity injection, otherwise known as your skin in the game.

We look at different things that you have contributed to the building of your business, because many people, when they start down a business building path, they might not really have direct goals in the very beginning.

A lot of times people build businesses as an answer to a problem — they see that there is a hole in a market or somebody’s not serving a particular group of people.

But in that process, they maybe are not the same as someone who very decisively says, ‘I am an entrepreneur, I am going to build a business, let me write a plan. Let me develop connections.’

It’s not always cut and dry. And a lot of times they start bootstrapping before they even consider that there might be other capital available to help them build this business.

We can look at some of that equity injection as money you put into your business.

What that allows is for small business owners to be able to use what they’ve already done instead of having to figure out how to have cash sitting in an account.

I wish that I had known that when I was running a business because I bootstrapped fully. I never was able to access any capital, and for me, if I had been able to utilize what I had already put in to then grow that into a loan, it would have made life a little easier.

How are you making sure that y’all are reaching all facets of the community to help get funding or help with those business questions? In the past you’ve talked specifically about Black women because they’re often overlooked for funding.

It’s something that I am struggling with — finding a way to best help because that is not the community that I reside in. I have been reaching out to all sorts of partnering groups and all sorts of other people that serve that community more intricately, and say, ‘I don’t want to tell you how to help the people that you help. I want you to tell me how to help the people and then I will show up, and I will do it.’ Because it is not for me to dictate.

One of my goals has been to meet people where they are. Share the information in whatever way they need and let them dictate to me how best to share the information. Because me telling you — that’s not how it works. I’m not going to be helpful and I genuinely want to help and get you information. I need to listen and hear how to give, how to share that with you, how you consume information.

Originally Posted on: https://www.bizjournals.com