Rich Messina's Play It Again Sports in Omaha pivoted to fitness equipment when COVID shut down team sports in March 2020. PPP loans, EIDL, and SCORE mentoring helped Nebraska small businesses keep employees and survive the pandemic.
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We buy, sell and trade brand new and quality used sporting goods and fitness equipment. My name is Rich Messina and I'm the owner operator of Play It Again Sports in Omaha. In March of 20, which is normally the busiest time of the year for us, all team sports stopped. And so we pivoted to selling fitness equipment and other items that were people that were able to continue to stay active while socially distanced.
Small business owners in Nebraska were able to take advantage of some of the SBA Covid relief programs like the PPP and the EIDL program. They were able to keep their employees on the payroll. They had the working capital that they needed to be able to keep them going during this pandemic.
Through the SBA support for SCORE in our great Omaha chapter, we provided mentoring service to this entrepreneur both when he was starting his business and after he had his business in place.
Rich Messina was able to obtain a paycheck protection program loan from us, which was really important in just keeping all of these small businesses in Nebraska going Throughout the pandemic.
SBA works with us in partnership as a backstop so that the bank can take on customers that might be riskier than we could otherwise handle. The SBA also allows us to take advantage of some of the funding sources that we don't have access to. So for my bank that means we've done SBA504 loans to help some businesses that are in later stages of development really take advantage of long term fixed rate financing that is superior to what they can get in the non SBA market.
When the pandemic hit, we were advised by a number of sources, including the SBA about a bunch of different programs that were out there available to us and the one that made sense was PPP and we got approved for some PPP money there. Also though, because our business continued to take off, we got a 7A loan through the SBA that helped us expand our business and grow both our footprint and our inventory and the services we were able to offer. Getting the PPP money really helped us obviously during the slowest period of that in the spring of 20, and allowed us to keep people on staff that otherwise we might not have been able to. And then again, that loan really helped us expand our business and grow into what we are today, where we're really up significantly from a year ago. So the process of applying for the PPP was pretty easy. I worked with my lender and they helped me with the paperwork and it got approved very quickly and we got funded very quickly and you know, helped us tremendously during that downtime.
