From day care to health care to high tech, small businesses in a host of industries continue opening and expanding in Iowa. Dave Lentell, spokesman for the U-S Small Business Administration offices in Iowa, says new quarterly figures show rises in both the number of loans and in the dollar amounts. “We’re still steadily increasing from 2004 to 2005. Something that’s very interesting to us is that looking at our third quarter dollar amount for fiscal 2005, 142-point-five million, we’ve already surpassed last year’s total dollar amount for the entire year,” Lentil says. The SBA made 658 loans in Iowa during the three months that ended June 30th, an increase of nearly 11-percent from the third quarter last year. Also, nearly 142-point-six million dollars was loaned — that’s up 58-percent from a year ago. Lentell says the motivations behind why people launch small businesses are as numerous as the businesses themselves.”There’s a confidence in the economy right now. There’s lots of reasons people start a small business, whether they want to be their own boss, rather there’s been a corporate layoff where they work or there’s some uncertainty in their job and they’ve just decided to take matters into their own hands,” he says, Of Iowa’s 240-thousand businesses, Lentell says more than 98-percent of them are considered small businesses. While there were more than 650 loans made to new and existing small Iowa businesses during the past quarter, he says there were several in a few key areas. “Health care-related businesses are very popular right now with the aging baby boomers,” he says. “We’re seeing some day cares, things related to the technology field, especially technology service firms.” For more information, surf to “www.sba.gov”.
