Good morning,
In March 2020, a small handful of Small Business Administration staffers set up shop in a makeshift operations center. Coffee, candy, and chips kept them energized, as the sleep-deprived crew tried to save small businesses across America.
“Those Costco runs were lifesavers,” Bill Briggs, who most recently served as the acting associate administrator for the SBA’s Office of Capital Access, tells Inc. Briggs oversaw the launch of the current round of the Paycheck Protection Program and served as the SBA’s liaison to financial institutions. A year ago, he notes, he and everyone else working through the relentless conference calls and thousands of emails to launch the PPP had no idea whether their rescue attempts would be successful.
On April 3, 2020, the program’s first day, the team waited with bated breath even as it expected a bumpy start to the “historic, Herculean effort,” Briggs says. And indeed, the glitches were many. To the outside world, it appeared to be a mess. Yet as the weeks elapsed, the program stabilized. Today, it has processed almost 9 million forgivable loans worth nearly $750 billion.
Read our story to learn what it was like, in Briggs’s own words, to get the PPP off the ground--and how far it’s come in the year since. |
0 Comments:
Post a Comment