More than 8,000 entrepreneurs and small businesses have been helped by the Florida SBDC at FIU. They’ve received advice and guidance on everything from registering a business to financing, marketing and all aspects of operations. With SBDC at FIU’s assistance, these small business owners accessed hundreds of millions of dollars of capital and learned best-practices for winning lucrative government contracts. What’s more, during the Covid pandemic, SBDC at FIU helped many of them apply for PPP and EIDL loans and learn how to pivot to stay afloat until they could get their businesses back on track.
That’s impact.
It may seem as if Florida SBDC at FIU has been around forever, given how ingrained SBDC’s consultants are in the small business community, but that’s not true. 2024 is the organization’s 10th anniversary year and we thought we should look back at how SBDC at FIU came to be and its impact in Miami-Dade and Monroe County’s business communities. I think you will discover it was strategically set up for success.
In the summer of 2013, Jacqueline Sousa, who would later become the founding director of SBDC at FIU, met the then-state director of the SBDC at a conference and asked him why Miami didn’t have an SBDC center. He said they were thinking about creating a center in Miami, so they stayed in touch. As a strategic advisor to FIU at the time, Sousa also spoke with FIU’s then-College of Business dean about how an SBDC center would be a great for FIU and he said “let’s go for it.”
A few months later, when the state SBDC Network put out the request for proposals, “I [helped lead] led the FIU effort to get that grant, and we were fortunate to win it,” Sousa said, and she was hired to be the founding Regional Director of the new Florida SBDC at FIU, part of the university’s College of Business.
There was a big need for the center because Miami has always been a city of small businesses, and most of those are micro businesses, Sousa explained. Indeed, an impact report SBDC at FIU did in 2018 found that Miami-Dade had one of the highest percentages of microbusinesses; those companies with fewer than 10 employees represented 81.3 percent of all businesses in the county. At the time, FIU was also becoming known for empowering business management in Miami, “and everything that we can do to help businesses in general, but specifically small businesses, I think it just goes to the core of what FIU represents,” she said.
A big focus of the initial years was on putting a great team in place, along with developing partnerships with stakeholders and setting up all the processes and procedures for the new center. Previously there had been a very small 2-consultant SBDC office in Miami, and Sousa ended up hiring Roberto Castellon from that office as one of SBDC at FIU’s first consultants. She also brought on Ricardo Newark, Ricardo Weisz, and Nilgun “Nile” Kirec in those early days and, together with Castellon, they continue as active SBDC consultants today. She hired Brian Van Hook as associate director, and Sousa would lead SBDC for the first five years of its existence.
In the beginning, there was a lot of hiring going on, and Sousa knew the importance of building a winning culture from the start. “Not only do you want to find people who are great at what they do, they also have to be great at communicating their knowledge. Then you’re trying to put a team together and you want people who work well together, who are going to make up the kind of culture you’d like the organization to have, so you have to go through a very careful selection process. But luckily, we really had a fantastic and still do have a fantastic team.” Today, most of the 22 consultants have been with SBDC at least five years.
As Sousa, Van Hook, and the team were putting in operational procedures, “We did a lot of things very differently from other SBDCs, and that was intentional,” Sousa said. “Having a lot of outside advisors in addition to employees gave us a lot of flexibility that most other SBDC centers didn’t have. In fact, a lot of [the other centers] started changing and doing it the same way.”
In addition to identifying a pool of consultants that collectively would bring deep expertise in all areas where entrepreneurs need help, were good at communicating their knowledge and worked well together, Sousa also looked for people “who really aren’t afraid of change and are enthusiastic about always learning and just not settling for whatever past experience they have.” Also very important: honesty. “It’s really important that good teams be able to be respectfully honest with each other. That means hearing things people may not want to hear,” Sousa said. And finally, it’s the right mix of expertise. “That blend of different experiences also contributes to the way the whole team works together,” Sousa said.
But getting the right team in place was only part of it. “I felt like it was really important to demonstrate to our community stakeholders that we were going to do the things that we said we were going to do, to follow through on things, to demonstrate that we were serious about helping businesses,” she said. That included having the data to show their impact helping businesses.
In 2019, Sousa was tapped to lead FIU’s Office of Executive and Professional Education as its director and Brian Van Hook took over the helm of SBDC at FIU, creating a seamless transition for the organization particularly since he had been the center’s associate director since the start.
“Having worked alongside the FSBDC at FIU team for five years and following in Jackie’s footsteps, I knew in 2019 that we already had a very special center. My focus was to build off that strong foundation and set up the center for continued success in the next ten years,” Van Hook said. “That involved deepening community partnerships in Miami-Dade and the Florida Keys, growing the team in in-demand consulting areas, and identifying new sources of funding to further expand our work.”
During the pandemic the center saw record levels of clients coming in to pivot their strategies or secure funding to stay afloat. “We were able to supplement the core consulting team with additional consultants funded by federal COVID funding, which helped keep pace and widened the specializations of an already great team. Many of those new consultants have remained with the team post-pandemic,” Van Hook said.
SBDC also focused more on partnerships with other small business groups in the community – joint trainings, referrals, and sharing resources. Creating those connections then allowed the groups to scale up through a number of joint programs, including the $2.5 million SBA Community Navigator grant for Miami-Dade County.
During the height of the pandemic, the center assisted over 3,500 businesses to secure $213.5 million in capital and $112 million in government contracts. In addition, SBDC at FIU helped launch 174 new businesses during the pandemic, Van Hook said.
“I am very proud of our consultants stepping up in a big way to help local businesses impacted by the pandemic. It was chaotic for everyone and FSBDC at FIU shifted into another gear to not just assist businesses but provide that lifeline when it was badly needed,” Van Hook said.
Under Van Hook’s tenure, the center also continued growing its new consulting and outreach in Monroe County, which FIU officially kicked off in October 2018. SBDC at FIU now has four Keys-based consultants from Key West to Key Largo. So far in 2024 the Keys team has already consulted 95 clients for 833 hours, which is the highest clients served so far in the county in a non-pandemic year.
In 2023, all this recent success was recognized in a big way. Out of over 1,000 SBDCs around the country, including nine strong centers in our state, Florida SBDC at FIU was recognized as the 2023 National SBDC of the year by the SBA.
Let’s take a look at the impact over the last 10 years. In terms of impact/outcomes, since the center started in 2014 through the end of 2023, the SBDC at FIU team provided the following client outcomes in Miami-Dade County and the Florida Keys.
- 8,052 entrepreneurs and small‐business owners assisted
- 123,890 hours of consulting
- 479 businesses launched
- $475 million in capital accessed
- $314 million in government contracts secured
- $471 million in increased revenues
“Seeing what SBDC has done over the years brings a smile to my face,” Sousa said. “Ten years later, it’s really nice to see how Brian has done a fantastic job and how they’ve grown — but most of all, it’s when I see and read about the businesses they’ve been helping, because at the end of the day, that’s what really made a difference for those businesses.”
Here’s to the next 10 years!