Treasury Secretary, SBA Chief Host Listening Session for Entrepreneurs

Last month the Obama administration announced with great fanfare a plan to increase small business lending. It also promised to host a conference where small businesses, small business advocates and lenders could share their recommendations on the most effective and fastest ways to get capital to cash-strapped entrepreneurs. The administration made good on its promise on Wednesday when it hosted a six-hour meeting in the Treasury Department’s gilded Cash Room. Several high-level officials were there, most notably Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Small Business Administration chief Karen Mills.

“The president wants us to listen to the best ideas in the country today, to bring those forward to him and give him some concrete options that he can act on,” Geithner told the group.

And listen they did–all day. A number of participants were extremely impressed by the fact that neither Geithner nor Mills made drive-by appearances at the start and end of the conference as is typical at these types of affairs. Instead the two spent the entire day talking to people and taking notes.

“It’s really refreshing that they’re not only here but substantively engaged, talking about real issues in a very candid way,” remarked Todd McCracken, president of the National Small Business Association.

So what did they hear? Many participants agreed that the government should extend into mid-2011 the SBA program provisions in the Recovery Act.

“There seemed to be a consensus that those stimulus provisions are working and working well, and now is not the time for those to end,” said Tony Wilkinson, president of the National Association of Guaranteed Lenders

. “We’ve attracted about 1200 banks back into the program, but, unfortunately, our stimulus funds are starting to run out. We’re hopeful that we’ll see an extension of those provisions until at least the end of this fiscal year.”

Sen. Mark Warner (D-Virginia) said that he and several other senators have sent a letter to President Obama recommending the creation of a $50 billion small business lending pool that would be funded with $40 billion from Troubled Asset Relief Program funds and $10 billion from private banks. Warner also called for the government to take much more aggressive action.

Other recommendations included making government programs more attractive to lenders, developing public-private lending and technical assistance partnerships, increasing SBA loan limits, enhancing small business technical assistance programs, reauthorizing and extending the New Markets Tax Credit Program

, and reconsidering how to apply FICO credit scoring of companies that, if not for the recession, would have good to excellent scores.

Mills and Geithner promised to put all of the suggestions gathered throughout the day into a report that will go to the president and also will be available online on the SBA and Treasury Websites.

Lesia Bates Moss, president of Seedco Financial, a Manhattan-based community lending organization, said that the forum was a “great starting point” but there’s a lot more work to be done.

“The clock is ticking with respect to suffering businesses and minority and women-owned businesses are disproportionately affected,” she said. Moss is particularly interested in the discussions that centered on finding ways to allow alternative lenders to provide capital and

public-private partnership aspects of the discussion. Her firm is the first to be funded under Goldman Sachs’ $500 million, 10,000 Small Business Initiative, which Moss says will help it continue to deliver innovative lending programs and deliver professional advisory and mentoring services to underserved small businesses.

Representatives of the banking industry, which have earned a bad rap during the credit crunch, had a chance to crow a little during the event. David Rader of Wells Fargo announced that his bank plans to increase its SBA lending in the next year from $828 million to $1.2 billion. Kevin Watters, a JPMorgan Chase executive, told the audience that his firm also has vowed to increase its small business lending and “What I’ve told my folks is, ‘If you’re not sure, do the loan’.”