Funds for Tech Aiding Defense, Education, Women Startups, Recovering Restaurants, and Kids

Hey everybody, it's Gene Marks. Welcome to another episode – this week's episode – of the Week in Review, a THRIVE. Donald Trump is our new president-elect, just winning the election this week. There will be a lot of impact by the Trump administration for small businesses, your business and mine, over the next couple of years, and we'll be addressing the impact of that over the next few weeks.

Starting with next week, we'll start preparing some special information and news that will help you prepare for a new administration coming on in January. But in the meantime, we've got other news to talk about. So, let's get right to it.

The first comes from a site called defensecoop.com. The headline is that the Pentagon expects billions to be pumped into small businesses following a Small Business Administration licensing to investors. The federal government has licensed the first cohort of investors under the Small Business Investment Company Critical Technology Initiative. It's expected to fund over $2.8 billion into more than 1,000 portfolio companies, many of them small businesses. 

The project aims to increase the flow of private capital into technology areas deemed critical to national defense capabilities and U.S. economic success, including component-level technologies and production processes. It's supported by the Pentagon's Office of Strategic Capital. 

So again, if you want to look for money under this new initiative, it's the Small Business Investment Company Critical Technology Initiative – I know it's a lot of what a lot of words; SBICCT. This initiative itself, just so you know, it's going to leverage SBA funding and outside investors, they're creating a bunch of funds that's going to be giving money to small businesses that are doing work in these areas: space, sensing and cyber integrated network systems, microelectronics, human machine interfaces, advancement materials, and a bunch of stuff more.

Lots of money that's out there available to you if you're in those areas. Certainly, something that you want to consider. 

Speaking of money, there was a report this past week – by the way, this comes out monthly in bizjournals.com – it's a roundup of available grants, like free money that's available to us as business owners. It's definitely an article that you want to check out. Let me give you an example of three of these grants, okay? 

One is Verizon. They are offering grants and education for small businesses. The Verizon Small Business Digital Ready program is offering $10,000 grants in businesses as part of a wider education effort. Business owners who complete at least two courses by Dec. 13 are eligible for the grant to be awarded by Verizon. 

Aurora Tech, which is a global initiative – global grant program – for women founders who have a functional product prototype and have received less than $4 million in funding and whose ventures are less than five years old. The award aims to spotlight how little funding female startup owners receive relative to male owners. The top winner gets a $30,000 grant. That's Aurora Tech.

The last one, and by the way there are others; $10,000 grants are available from the Restaurant Disaster Relief Fund. So, this is important if you're located down in the southeast that has been hit by the hurricanes recently. Small business owners who have been hit by a natural disaster are eligible for up to a $10,000 grant made possible by a partnership between DoorDash and a small business platform: Hello, Alice. 

I'm only naming a few of the grants in this article. There's a bunch more that you can check it out. It's on bizjournals.com, and the title of the article is “Small Business Grants You Can Apply for in November 2024.” 

Finally, while we're talking about money, a new and interesting study came out that was published on the site SSRN, which is a platform that does a lot of scientific and research studies. The study was just released in the middle of September, and it involved researchers from NYU, UC Irvine, University of Wisconsin, Duke, Maryland, and a bunch of other schools. 

And you know what the study found? The study found that you might want to think twice before giving money to your kids. The goal of the study was to examine the casual impacts of an unconditional cash transfer on a range of key family processes that are thought to affect children's development, including economic hardship, maternal well-being, family relationships, and parenting.

Well, the study's authors studied a bunch of people of all different ages and scenarios, where family members, business owners, parents unconditionally gave money to their kids. And you know what they concluded? They concluded that they found little support for the hypothesis that material hardship, maternal well-being, or family relationships are positively affected by a moderate, unconditional cash transfer among families with children.

Here's the implication. Cash support may provide other benefits for families and children, but moderate levels of support do not appear to address self-reported economic hardship, and maternal well-being is captured in standard survey measures. 

So, the takeaway is that if you're thinking of giving money to your kids, you might want to think twice about doing it because, this study has shown that it really doesn't have a significant impact on them.

All right. I know you want to hear more about the election. We're going to be talking about it next week. I promise you all the ways that it will impact your business. But in the meantime, my name is Gene Marks. You have been watching and listening to the Paychex THRIVE Week and Review. 

If you'd like any more helping tips and advice and running your business. Sign up for our Paychex THRIVE newsletter. Go to paychex.com/thrive. Thanks so much for watching or listening. We'll see you again next week. Take care.

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