Soon, small business owners in Western New York will have a team of advocates working on their behalf.  SEAWNY (The Small Enterprise Alliance of Western New York) was recently launched with a goal of “fill[ing] the void in the local market.”

How is this to be achieved?  By bolstering networking for this demographic providing it with the resources to facilitate the process of launching, operating and maintaining a small business in the area. Along with this there will be seminars, webinars and an annual conference.

According to President and CEO of Welke Custom Brokers USA Inc. (and one of the steering committee members that oversaw the organization’s establishment), the aim of SEAWNY is to: “bridge that gap between what’s happening at the large chambers and what’s happening at the small chambers.”  SEAWNY is taking its organizational model from Northeast Ohio’s COSE – the Council of Smaller Enterprises.

In other good news for SMEs in New York, small firms in the NY metro area received considerably more loans than the national average.  Data was received from the monthly analysis of 1,000+ small business loan requests conducted by the Biz2Credit’s Small Business Lending Index.  In general though, looking at America as a whole, it was found that over the last 12 months there has been a gradual increase of loan approvals.  Further, in May, a new online loan offering program for smaller loan investments of between $10-35,000 was launched by Wells Fargo.