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Small Businesses Are Seeing Success Thanks to Hello Alice
Co-founders
Elizabeth Gore and
Carolyn Rodz in action (Photo by Cayce Clifford)Starting a small business can feel like falling down a rabbit hole. You ask yourself: Where do I go? What do I do? Whom can I learn from? Why do these tiny cakes in a box say “eat me” on them? Well, maybe not all businesses have tiny cakes. But if they do, those tiny cakes are there because of Hello Alice. And once you take a bite, get ready to watch your business grow.
Hello Alice is a free platform for small business owners, offering access to capital, with loans, credit and grants, along with helpful tools and resources and a one-of-a-kind community. It’s available to anyone looking for financial guidance for business, but particularly catering to what Hello Alice calls the new majority — women, people of color, U.S. veterans, the LGBTQ+ community and Indigenous peoples.
“I am very proud that 90 percent of our platform identifies in some way with the new majority,” says Elizabeth Gore, who co-founded Hello Alice with Carolyn Rodz in 2017 and now hosts more than 1.2 million companies on the platform.
Gore and Rodz met while Gore was the entrepreneur-in-residence at Dell looking for ways technology could assist small and midsize businesses. Rodz was passionate about the same cause and they eventually connected at networking events.
“I was shocked at how hard it was in our country to get equal access,” says Gore, who is mindful of the fact that she and Rodz aren’t personally members of the different demographics they represent. This is why Hello Alice partners with organizations like the NAACP and National Gay & Lesbian Chamber of Commerce to bring targeted knowledge and experience to the different under-represented cohorts on the platform. “Their expertise is always in the forefront.”
With more than a million companies come more than a million backgrounds and experiences. And while many small businesses in the new majority struggle to gain loans, Hello Alice has teamed with big organizations to aid their members with about $30 million in grants.
“We really believe that’s one way to tackle the gap before you can access a loan, which has gotten harder and harder,” Gore says, noting that even “small grants like $5,000 or $10,000 at a time can make a difference in the growth of a company.”
As a resident of the North Bay herself, Gore notes the resiliency of small businesses. “Even before Covid, we’ve been through fires, floods, really extreme power outages, and then Covid.” And that’s just in the past few years.
Navigating these hurdles is not easy, even if you are resilient and especially if you are part of an underserved population. Within Hello Alice, there is also a community where small business owners can find other owners — creating a support system to share advice and ideas, or just to meet some local like-minded entrepreneurs who have experienced similar hardships.
Hello Alice is unlike other financial health platforms out there because it is so keenly focused on equity. When you join, the platform asks questions about your gender, race, etc., so that it can cater to your needs in the best way possible.
“We’re gonna make sure that you as a demographic and a founder are also being supported,” emphasizes Gore. “Not just your business.”
