Eight small business owners from Iowa have been in Washington, D.C. with their counterparts from 15 other states to talk with lawmakers and policymakers.
Ashley Kuhns owns a non-profit child support program in Grinnell and says they are discussing several issues. “Some of them include access to capital, affordable capital. Child care is one of them, the workforce is another one of them, competing with big businesses,” she says. She says lack of access to affordable capital makes it hard for small businesses to grow. “For us, because I don’t have a building, and I’m a nonprofit, it’s really difficult for us to access affordable capital, to be able to build a building if I want, or to afford that in this landscape, because I don’t have access to SBA loans, I don’t have access to the same things that some rural or small businesses have,” Kuhns says. She says she can’t offer the same pay packages and benefits that larger companies can. “Being able to compete with those bigger businesses with those other businesses, is really something that lawmakers need to consider when building policy or having those conversations,” Kuhns says.
Martina Hoogland from the Woudstra Meat Market in Orange City says they have the same concerns about access to money. “If we could take monthly what we’re putting into our interest payments, putting that into our businesses instead, the growth rate and the people that we would be able to impact and hire would grow drastically,” she says. “So that is definitely what I am advocating for the most.”
Aaron Lenz owns the Roadhouse Sports Bar in Orange City and is concerned about supply costs. “Since we opened four years ago, we’ve seen our cost of food products go about 47% higher than it were than there were when we opened,” Lenz says. “And that same pressure is felt on the average consumer and how they spend their dollars at the grocery store, which trickles into every other aspect of their life.” Lenz says looming tariffs are part of that cost concern. “My ask from our representatives is that if we’re going to see tariffs being implemented across the board, if we can somehow figure out how to exclude food products from those, I think that would help just about every consumer in the United States,” he says. Lenz says they also want consistency in regulations.
The Iowa business owners met with lawmakers and Small Business Administration leader Kelly Loeffler. The fly-in was organized by Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses Voices.
(Woody Gottburg, KSCJ, Sioux City contributed to this story.)