Erica Buchanan started her own house and office cleaning business, called Miss Meticulous, in South Kingstown about a year ago. Since then, she’s attracted several regular customers.
Now, the 24-year-old is ready to make Miss Meticulous her full-time job. But to do that, she needed $500 for a new vacuum cleaner and so she could send out 2,000 direct-mail fliers.
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“I didn’t think I could get a small loan,” she said.
But Buchanan was able to secure a $3,000 loan from Accion USA, through a new workstation at the Center for Women & Enterprise in Providence.
The workstation includes a desktop computer, QuickBooks software, an Internet connection and a scanner/copier/printer. As part of a partnership established last month between the CWE and Accion, the lender has installed workstations in fellow nonprofit CWE’s three locations, in Boston, Providence and Worcester, aiming to reach more people.
“We wanted to place workstations within an organization that was reputable and active in serving the small business community,” said Erika Eurkus, program director for Accion, a microenterprise lender based in Boston.
The workstations, financed by a grant from Hewlett-Packard, complement Accion’s online application system, which was launched last fall, Eurkus said. And with CWE’s finance specialists on hand to help clients, more loans are likely to be processed.
“With Accion, we guide [clients] into direct involvement,” said Dennis Toprac, finance specialist at CWE. “With the [U.S. Small Business Administration], there is a level of separation. We don’t take the client to the SBA and get a loan directly from them.”
Toprac guided Buchanan to apply for Accion’s loan online, he said, because she was a perfect candidate.
“I didn’t know I could get a loan so easily,” Buchanan said. “They got back to me really quickly.”
An Accion loan officer calls applicants, sometimes within two days after they apply, Eurkus said. To qualify an applicant for a loan, the nonprofit looks at cash flow, collateral and credit scores.
“We do look at those typical underwriting criteria,” she said. “But we are able to be more flexible. Instead of just looking at the credit score, we look at business history. We ask them to give contact [information] for a supplier or customer. We ask for character references.”
Accion also looks at any classes a business owner might have taken, because it “shows a dedication to the business,” Eurkus said.
Accion last year financed about $1 million in loans to microenterprises in New England, she said. It has loaned more than $8 million in New England since its inception in the early 1990s and more than $160 million throughout the United States in that time.
Eurkus said a microenterprise generally employs no more than five employees, though there are exceptions.
“We work with everybody,” she said, but with a loan-size limit of $25,000, the nonprofit does not work with mid-sized or large businesses. “We don’t target a particular demographic, but minority- and women-owned businesses tend to experience a disproportionate lack of access to capital. Our clients are about 40 percent Latino.”
The goal of the new workstations is to reach more business owners, Eurkus said, with a minimum of expense. So while the nonprofit does have staff offices in Boston, Atlanta and Miami, it also has partnership arrangements in Providence; Worcester; Albany, Ga.; Orlando and Tampa, Fla., as well as licensing arrangements in Chicago, New Mexico, New York, San Diego and Texas.
The loan capital comes mostly from private investors, some of whom lend money to Accion’s loan fund at 1 percent interest. Eurkus said Accion also raises its own operating capital through fundraisers.
For nonprofits such as the CWE, the benefit of the partnership is twofold, Toprac said. It extends the services CWE can offer its clients, and it provides a computer workstation for entrepreneurs who don’t have access to one.
“There are people, a large number, who do not have computers,” he said “With the workstation, they can store files on the computer or on a disk. They can utilize it to help their business in a serious way until they can get a computer.”
