Building Entrepreneur Ecosystems with Technology

All right, it's that time. It's Friday, and we've got another In Case You Missed It. This time we're talking about building entrepreneur ecosystems with technology, and we're joined by Hubs founder and CEO Ginny Poon, who is the winner of CivStart's 2024 Government Innovation Challenge and Pitch Fest. She's here to explain how cities can re-envision technical assistance programs to bring education and resources to their small businesses. Jenny, thanks so much for carving some time out to join Joe and I.

Thank you for having me.

So maybe just to start, I know this is your first In Case You Missed It with us. Tell our audience a little bit about yourself and kind of your journey in this wild world of GovTech.

Yeah, I mean, I didn't start in anything government. My family, I come from a family of immigrants. My parents were refugees. So I really have more of the experience of an entrepreneur, an entrepreneur out of necessity. And so I grew up seeing my parents struggle with navigating growing a small business and always was like stepping in to help them where I could. I was always told not to become an entrepreneur too. And so I did the traditional path, went to school, got my degree, worked in corporate America, and then in the last recession, lost my job and decided to start my own business. became an entrepreneur out of necessity as well. And through that whole journey, I was always just looking at how could I have helped my parents. And when I became an entrepreneur, I saw that there were all these resources out there, but they were really hard to access. And if my parents knew what I knew now as an adult, how different their journey could have been. And so that's what we set out to build. I first founded a marketing agency and then fell into community development and starting the first coworking and entrepreneurship center in Phoenix, and then a few years later started Hub, which is a digital tool that helps governments deploy resources and create access to a lot of programs and support systems for small businesses. So that's, that's my journey.

Well, that's, that's phenomenal. You've also recently won the grand prize at CivStart's 2024 Local Government Innovation Challenge and Pitch Fest. Maybe you could tell us a little bit more about how great that, you know, winning that prize is and a little bit of the focus on that event.

Yeah, that was a wild experience. I, as much as I've been in entrepreneurial communities, I've never had to actually pitch anything. I've sat in the judging seat before. And so I have a lot of empathy for anybody who has to stand up there and actually pitch something and abide by a certain amount of time. But the pitch competition was really about looking for solutions in government that enhances communication with government and business owners and citizens, streamlines processes, and fosters collaboration between government and local entrepreneurs. And so we presented our, our solution, our hub platform solution, and inevitably won the, the prize, which was awesome. There were a lot of great ideas out there, but I think That pitch competition really was, was the impetus to us really expanding nationally now. We have been heavily focused in the Southwest region, really just working hand in hand with the governments like in our backyard and in this region. And now by winning that pitch competition, we are navigating a national expansion. And it's proven that it's like helping us validate that this is really the right path, right? Governments need more efficient systems. They need more streamlined and automated processes. No government economic developer knows everything about small business. No entrepreneur and no, no one even in my shoes that supports entrepreneur ecosystems has all of the answers for all the different types of businesses that exist. And so the idea is, can we leverage all of the resources that exist across the community help economic developers deploy those resources more efficiently, route businesses to the right resources, and make that a really easy process. And that will create a lot of equity in communities as well.

Love the, love the mission. And, you know, as you're focused on helping these entrepreneurs and small businesses thrive, you inevitably have encountered a fair number of challenges that they kind of are coming up against. So, you know, what did you see? You know, what was kind of the, the impetus for for some of that inspiration and how can technology help kind of intersect that?

Yeah, I think it became really obvious during the pandemic. I think in these moments of chaos, you see the biggest problems arise and they become actually much more clearer to solve. That's what happened in the last recession in 2008, 2009, when we started the Coworking and Entrepreneurship Center. And then it happened again during this pandemic. And what we saw was There was a lot of funding coming down to small businesses through cities, but cities were having a lot of challenges in deploying it to the right businesses. Even at the federal level, we were seeing that challenge with how the PPP loans were rolled out. And so when we dug into the work with our economic developers in our region, we saw that there was a lack of tracking and metrics reporting. There's a challenge with digital transformation. Like, there wasn't a lot in the digital space to run programs like this. And then they really didn't know how to reach the small businesses because I think for a long time, the efforts were really just, hey, let's go out and meet a business and maybe we can route them to something else that exists in a community. There really wasn't anything major and substantial that they could give a small business. And now for the first time in the pandemic, it was, okay, now we have some funds where we could actually help make some major shifts for small businesses. And then also realizing there's this whole ecosystem out there. There's chambers of commerce, there's other types of like nonprofit organizations that are helping small businesses in all these different ways. How do we leverage all of these moving pieces and make that really easy for a small business owner? Because even Like, I get lost in a lot of that, right? And so they were looking at what's a digital solution that could help speed up that process, and also knowing that most economic developers across almost all cities is a team of like 3 max, right? And so they're limited in bandwidth and capacity. They also have all this funding coming down that they need to figure out how to give to the hardest-hit businesses. And They often aren't entrepreneurs themselves, so they don't even know where to start to help small businesses, but they have the passion to help. And so we saw from the government side a need to help distribute, and from a business owner side, all of the challenges of not being able to be physically open. So how do we make these big pivots for small businesses who have traditionally been brick and mortar, right? How do they create new revenue streams that they didn't have before? How do they navigate the government, like, grant process? Because that has never been something that was normal for them. And so while we had to close our physical coworking space, we had more demand than ever with businesses needing help across, like, education, accessing grants and opportunities, contacting and connecting with trainings and, like, other programs that existed in their community and knowing who to really trust. And so we kind of put all those 2 things together and also added in a layer of trust with finding local experts and automating a technical assistance program. And I don't know if technical assistance means a lot of different things to different people, and so I'll define that as one-on-one support from experts within your local community. So we built like a cyclical cycle where we would pull— we pull in local experts to help local business owners. And so you create an economy in that movement alone that all stays within your local community.

You kicked us off with this wonderful kind of personal connection about your experience with your parents. And as we walk through the rest of it, you're right, the, the kind of confusing nature of local government or government at large. But I think what stands sticks, I think, with our audience is those success stories. And as much as you're able, maybe you can walk us through an example with a city government and how you've managed to connect some of those dots between incubating that support with that local entrepreneur community and local government.

Yeah, I think one of the challenges with local government and doing this work at all is the ability to see the data behind this type of effort. Whereas like in attraction, you can throw incentives at big corporations and they're gonna bring these jobs, right? With small businesses, like small donut shop down the street, it's gonna take a year or 2 for them to create the job and economic impact that you hope for. And so a lot of times you, it's hard to track that because it takes a year and it takes regular consistent outreach, which how do you do that at scale when you have thousands of businesses that you're working with? And so our system not only provides the support that is varying for all different kinds of businesses, that helps them move up and create jobs and increase revenues and expand that tax base, but it tracks it over time and as— and tracks that journey. So if you as a business owner need, like you're a restaurant and you had to shut down, or you're just, you're open, but you're struggling with like getting more sales and Maybe the next step is to build an e-commerce component of your business model, an online shop where people can buy from our system. You can come on, you can register in our system, and you get free support essentially. You get, you can get a website built through the technical assistance program, and we've seen that be successful in that it doubled. Like an example is one business owner that worked with a social media expert and that person doubled the following, which expanded their revenue as a small business owner. That took a couple months to get there, right? And it took the support of one local expert helping this local business. You multiply that by— we have almost about 1,000 businesses on most of our cities. And I think we've broken down that number to be for every Every 3 business owners that have received technical assistance support, we see 1 job created. And so if you're serving 1,000, and the, the dollar amount, I think we broke that down to about a $500 investment to create that 1 job, is a significantly lower number than traditionally for investing in small businesses. And so By seeing that type of success and being able to track it, we've seen cities like the city of Mesa invest even further. So they're investing in creating their own incubator space that now becomes a front door for all small businesses. They have a whole program that is branded called the Mesa Business Builder so that any business that starts in Mesa can get all of this type of support at no cost, right, as an incentive to basically garden economically garden locally, right? If they see more local businesses grow, then they can, they can capture those businesses, and it creates much further and deeper investment in the local community than just doing tax incentives for attraction. So I don't know if that is what you're looking for. I think the biggest problem traditionally is that this is really hard to track, like And this type of investment is really hard to track. But because we've built a system that continually is a safe place for businesses to come back to, we are tracking them as they get more services and get more support and work with the Chamber of Commerce or work with a local nonprofit, and in 2 years create those jobs and additional revenue for themselves.

So, you know, as you think about the fostering of communication, you know, one of the things that doesn't always exist within cities is this collaboration between city officials and the local entrepreneurs and the dialogue that's there. And so I'd love for you to maybe share a little bit about, you know, how your solution kind of facilitates and maybe catalyzes some of that conversation that may not always be natural or present.

Yeah, so we have a lot of automations built into our system that make it easier for one, economic developers to connect with small business owners. Meaning like as soon as a business owner joins our system, they get a welcome message from economic developer. There's continual check-ins that are automated. So an economic developer doesn't have to manually go in and do a lot of that. On top of that, we collect a lot of data. Like I was mentioning testimonials and stories that often get shared with city council. And a big mission of ours is to get all of those departments connected to this system, right? Because it does connect. If you are in permitting, that should not live outside of economic development because business owners have to navigate that permitting process, right? And so we're starting to make inroads with that permitting department. So when they go out to flag signage issues, that they're also sharing that there's this program where you can get help. to get your signs up to date and through the permitting process, right? It's cross-connecting these different departments that are often siloed. Another example is even like water departments. If there's issues with water as it relates to business owners, if they know about this program, they can also help share. And so this is a free program, right? There's no cost for a business owner to be a part of this. it's all to like benefit the small business owners. So though I think the challenge often with governments is the departments are siloed. So how do we get all the different departments talking about this? So we've built a whole knowledge library. As soon as a business or as soon as a city partners with us, they have a whole kit of communication tools that they don't need to build themselves, like SOPs and processes and graphics for their marketing so that it all is easily deployed and communicated to all the different departments, but also your entire community. community to get the word out, which means our onboarding rate is really high. We also ask our cities to share best practices, so they're also contributing to this knowledge base of how to do effective small business retention and ecosystem building within their community. So that has helped. We've seen city council now, like, because our reporting is, is pretty simply put together, city council talking about these programs, sharing about these programs. There's strategies around how city council can go out when they do their constituent meetings to talk about these programs. And then they're able to also encourage businesses to participate and find these resources because we're trying to unlock access, right?

As you're unlocking that access and breaking down those silos, I imagine it's a massive, you know, data effort as well. So maybe you could expand on that. What role is data playing in terms of your offerings and how do you ensure that whatever information you are collecting is used effectively and ethically?

Oh yeah. So I also sit on the National Women's Business Council, which advises Congress and the SBA around initiatives that can help women business owners. And that is one big topic is how do we centralize all of the data that is being collected in all these different places? And then how do we use that to inform us moving forward? So we do collect a lot of data. A lot of that is aggregated data that only lives in the security of the government. You know, it is government. Most governments have their— what is it? Their— like if they were ever audited, that they do have to share that information. But what we do is as a part of this onboarding process, we communicate to business owners what you share with us can, can be shared. Most everything isn't— most of everything shared isn't private information. It's like public information that can be found. But what we do with that data is we're able to find a lot of really great trends. Like we're seeing trends across our underserved communities, um, with access to capital. We're like, in some communities, in specific zip codes, we can dial down to what are the biggest challenges that they're running into, to be able to say and pivot on a month-to-month basis of what the specific challenges across specific community members. So for example, in a specific zip code in Phoenix here, there's a high population of Black business owners, and they've been heavily impacted by light rail construction. We can see all of that data, and because a lot of them are retail-type businesses, we can develop programs specifically that solve like the foot traffic issues that they're having, right? And we can do that in real time versus waiting until an entire program is over and then, then it's a whole nother year to implement, right? We can do that by seeing that within a week of onboarding X number of businesses and their real-time engagement with our system. Um, another example is our smart notifications also help With that. So as business owners, you know, I struggle with certain things. Every business owner might be a little bit different, but if this business owner is struggling with financial support, they're struggling with like navigating QuickBooks or how to make sure their business is in line to qualify for a loan, our smart notifications and our system can route them to the right resources versus waiting for economic developer to assess their situation, right? So those are the things that we're working on too, to help streamline and automate with AI and smart notifications that ideally help an economic developer that's a team of 1 or 2 do the job of 10, right?

That's a great segue. And where I kind of wanted to go next was what impact are you seeing or do you anticipate to see with like generative AI and large language models impact in terms of the work that you're doing today?

Man, that world is changing like every single day. So ask me tomorrow and I'll have probably an additional 10 more items that I'm adding to our roadmap for our dev team. But we're looking to build the best recommendation engine for small businesses, right? So when you come on and localized and personalized. So we're aggregating all of the resources that are available, resource mapping across your community. We're layering that with built-in technical assistance so you can run an effective small business personalized program without a team of 20. We're using AI to then improve that and say, like, read everything that has been collected, verify that these programs are effective, and let's route businesses to the right thing. And so essentially you'd get a roadmap for what you need. utilizing resources locally to help small businesses. That's where we're going, at least in the next 6 months to a year for AI. Moving forward after that, there's a component of what we want to do for economic developers, which would be like, let's compare this across a national network. Let's compare this with other cities. Where do you compare? And what are we— what can we leverage from other experiences? And pull that in and create more better and faster strategic plans. Because we do that now on an annual basis, but it requires a lot of people power. And we're doing that in a small subset. As we expand, we can do that across a national network and pull a lot more data to educate and create strategic plans that are personalized for communities.

Well, Jenny, it's been so great having you on. I mean, you know, kudos for the amazing work that you're doing. I think, you know, it's very clearly mission-oriented, It's such a critical need within our local government agencies across the country. So my last question for you is just where can those agencies find you? How do they get in touch? Where can they learn more about your capabilities?

Yeah, so you can find us on our website, joinhuub.com. We have 2 U's. Ask me on the next show how that name came to be, but joinhuub.com with 2 U's. You can find us on LinkedIn. You can also like connect with any of the cities that we're in. We have over 5,000 businesses engaged in our system. We have over a dozen cities that we work with, over 45 economic developers. We're constantly looking to improve our system. We're launching pilots every year with including new cities that might want to learn about you know, new ways of doing these things that we're doing. And so being a part of a pilot would let you kind of soft introduce into our system because it is a new technology and there's change management that needs to happen. So pilot program we're launching in September where you get to kind of beta test new features that we have coming out and see if it might be a good fit for your community. So you can reach out to me around Around that as well.

Well, Jenny, thanks so much for joining us on this episode of In Case You Missed It, and congratulations again on your—

Thank you.

Everyone have a wonderful weekend.