New Grant Program to Support Small Business Exporting

By Rieva Lesonsky

President Obama’s National Export Initiative has long supported increased exporting by small companies. Now the federal government, via the Small Business Administration, is taking additional steps to ease the process by providing grants to states to support their efforts to help entrepreneurs export.

The State Trade and Export Promotion (STEP) pilot program, which launched March 1, will give states as much as $90 million in grants over the next three years.

STEP was established by the Small Business Jobs Act of 2010, and all 50 states, the District of Columbia and U.S. territories can apply for grants. How much each state receives will depend on the state’s budget and proposal for increasing small business exporting.

“The global market offers countless opportunities for small business owners who are well positioned to grow their volume and customer base beyond our borders, and in doing so, create good-paying jobs in their local communities,” SBA Administrator Karen Mills said in announcing the program. “These grants, through the partnerships they will create at the state level, will strengthen the support available to help small business take that first step to begin exporting, and for those who are already exporting, grow into additional markets.”

Some of the types of activities the grants will support include:

• Helping small businesses take part in foreign trade missions

• Sales trips to overseas markets

• Designing marketing materials or creating marketing campaigns for international marketing

• Trade show exhibits focused on exporting efforts

• Training workshops or export initiatives that are in line with the goals of the pilot grant initiative.

The STEP pilot grant application period continues through April 26. Awards for the first year of the grant program will be issued in summer of 2011. Of course, as a small business owner, you can’t apply, but you can get more information at www.sba.gov/STEP and then keep tabs on local news to find out whether your state is getting involved.

Image by Flickr user Andreas Andelmann (Creative Commons)

This entry was posted on Friday, March 18th, 2011 at 6:00 am and is filed under Capital Access, Raising Capital, Small Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.


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