🔒WBDC grants program helps women-owned businesses gain access to more funding sources

In August 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic was in full swing, Women’s Business Development Council founder and CEO Fran Pastore noticed something disturbing about the government financial aid being distributed to small businesses in Connecticut.

That led to a conversation with Lt. Gov. Susan Bysiewicz.

“We were talking about the disparity in the pandemic funds that were awarded to small businesses; whether it was federal or state, it didn’t matter,” she said. “The number of women-owned businesses and real small businesses that received any funds was negligible.”

They agreed to find a solution to that disparity, and in 2021 settled on the WBDC creating a grant program for women-owned small businesses.

“By the end of 2022, the economic impact was really remarkable,” said Pastore, whose nonprofit provides business consulting and other services to women-owned businesses. “We saw 80% of those businesses increase their sales, 60% increase their profits and about 25% of them hire a new employee.”

As positive as those results were, though, Pastore said there was an even more noteworthy benefit.

“A very large percentage of them go on to secure traditional funds from a lending institution, and that’s what we’re really trying to do,” she said. “So the driver (of the grant program) is getting more women to access capital.”

Ignite grants

Since its inception in 2021, the Ignite grant program has provided nearly 230 women-owned businesses with grants between $2,500 and $10,000.

According to the WBDC website, grants are awarded “for clearly defined projects that will have a measurable impact on the business, its growth and profitability.”

Grant funds can’t be used for operating expenses, real estate improvements, as reimbursement for past purchases or to repay debt. Applicants also are required to “have invested at least $2,500 into their business in the last 12 months, unless located in a distressed municipality.”

Business owners who have received the grants all praise them for not only helping their enterprises grow, but especially for being a catalyst for other financial aid and capital sources.

Recipients include Julie Robbins, founder and owner of New Haven-based Well for Women, which she describes as a massage “sanctuary.”

Robbins said she struggled to find funding when she launched her business, so she was forced to “cobble together a small line of credit from Liberty Bank and a whole bunch of credit cards.”

She said she spent three months chasing a U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) loan, only to be turned down.

“They told me I was discriminating because we were only seeing women,” she said.

In fact, her wellness center, which employs 14 people, offers more than massage therapy.

“I’ve been in practice as a massage therapist for 28 years,” she said. “The Well for Women specializes in prenatal and postpartum care. That makes us a unique offering, so people tend to travel a long way to get to us.”

She received the Ignite grant in November 2021, hoping to use the money toward reworking her website and social media presence. After receiving the funding, she leveraged it into two additional grants, one from the city of New Haven and the other from the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven.

Those grants helped her add two more therapy rooms, a linen room and an office.

“I give credit to the WBDC for that,” she said.

Thinking strategically

So does Mary Ruth Shields, founder and owner of Hartford-based United Sewing and Design LLC.

Founded in 2017, her Park Street business manufactures “flexible goods, which usually means something to do with fabric or some other flexible material like plastic or vinyl,” she said.

Her business, for which she employs herself and three part-time workers, also provides services like product development or small batch manufacturing, Shields said.

“We specialize in mostly apparel, but we also do a lot of prototyping for bags and medical devices,” she said.

Shields, who said she is skittish about taking on debt, received an Ignite grant at the end of 2021, and leveraged it to obtain a separate $20,000 Small Business Investment Fund grant from the city of Hartford, and a $7,800 grant from Hartford-based HEDCO Inc., a small business lender and consultant.

Samantha Cross — business advisor for the WBDC, which had a $7.6 million budget in 2023 — said leveraging an Ignite grant for other grants or loans is common, for a specific reason.

“In general, our grants are the first time that a women-owned business has access to capital outside of their own personal investment for the business,” Cross said. “So, a lot of the time, they think they don’t know what they’re doing. They think they don’t know what lenders want. So, our grants are not by accident.”

As part of the grant application process, the WBDC asks questions and for documents a lender would request. And not every business that applies for an Ignite grant receives one, Cross said.

“There’s a lot of people who don’t get the grant the first time,” she said. In those cases, it’s because “they’ve never had to think strategically about their business.”

Going through that process helps prepare business owners for what they will experience in dealing with a lender or financial institution.

“Once they go through that process, they find getting extra capital from a lender to be less intimidating,” Cross said.

Big picture

Mark Moeller, of Westport, a former restaurateur and nationally known consultant who mentors new restaurant owners via the WBDC, agrees that many who start their own businesses don’t fully understand everything that is required to be successful.

“They don’t take the big picture into account,” he said. “They say, ‘I’m a great chef and I can open a restaurant,’ and they forget that they don’t know what they don’t know.”

Finance, for one, is “not something they’re usually very good at,” he continued. “Others know what equipment they want to use, but they don’t know how to design their kitchen so it’s efficient.”

He cited the example of Daniella Palazzolo, founder and owner of Cucina Daniella in Darien, her first “brick-and-mortar” business. Palazzolo began as a “farmer’s market chef,” Moeller said, and initially planned to open in a different location, but she “ran into an issue with the town.”

Fortunately, she found what turned out to be an ideal location for her Italian specialty food store at 286 Tokeneke Road.

“It’s a good size for her,” Moeller said. “It wasn’t too big, where she’s biting off more than she could handle, and it also gives her an opportunity to be profitable faster because she can limit her employees.”

Palazzolo said a $10,000 Ignite grant she received in 2022 was initially intended to be used to buy a dough sheeter, which flattens balls of dough into one large sheet, but instead was used to buy bread ovens.

“I will tell you that the WBDC was very instrumental for me,” she said, “because I took advantage of all the classes that they offered” and also met Moeller, whom she credited with helping her find her location.

She also leveraged the Ignite grant into a $262,000 SBA loan, which she received in January 2023.

“For me though, it wasn’t just the money,” Palazzolo said of the WBDC grant. “It was the contacts. It was building confidence through different classes, how to build a business plan. … Otherwise, I wouldn’t know where to start.”

The WBDC opened the application process for its next round of grants on Aug. 12. The deadline to apply is Sept. 24.