New York is a brutal place to run a small business, and the city quietly offers a stack of free programs to make it less so, from lease lawyers to one-on-one navigators. The catch is awareness: a lot of owners never learn the help is there until they are already in trouble.
The latest piece of it came after disaster. This spring the Department of Small Business Services partnered with Islamic Relief USA to provide $128,000 in emergency grants to businesses hit by the March 19 fire in Midwood’s Little Pakistan commercial strip, a reminder that the agency does more than run seminars.
But the everyday menu is broad and free. SBS runs free business courses, offered in Spanish, Chinese and Russian among other languages, plus FastTrac entrepreneurship bootcamps and a partnership with Coursera for online courses built by university faculty. The most concretely useful programs tend to be the unglamorous ones: Commercial Lease Assistance gives small businesses free legal help signing, renewing or renegotiating a commercial lease, and NYC BEST assigns a single staffer to help an owner navigate city rules, licenses and permits.
There is also money on the table for the right businesses. Companies that are at least 51 percent owned by minorities or women can get certified as an M/WBE, which opens the door to city contracts that are otherwise hard to reach.
The honest problem is not that the programs are bad; it is that they are invisible until a crisis forces an owner to go looking. A free lease lawyer is far more useful before you sign a bad lease than after, and a navigator who knows which permit you need saves money you do not realize you are about to lose.
If you run a small business, the single starting point is the city’s Small Business Services site, where the courses, the lease help, the M/WBE certification and a request for an NYC BEST navigator all live. It is a free resource worth bookmarking now, before the lease dispute or the surprise permit problem shows up.
Featured image: Bushwick Daily
