Laurie Roth has a wide range of business experience, but most of her career has centered on a narrow field of finance: U.S. Small Business Administration lending. 

The industry veteran currently operates SBA SOS LLC, a home-based, one-person consulting firm that helps small businesses secure SBA loans. 

She also is the founding manager of the Inland Northwest Women’s Business Center, which is located in the East Central Community Center building, at 500 S. Stone, and through which she works mostly with women-led startups. While another administrator has taken over management of the Women’s Business Center, Roth continues to teach classes there. 

But Roth says it’s her 30-plus years of work in the SBA lending arena that has led to her being named as the 2015 Women’s Advocate of the Year by the SBA’s Seattle district office. She received the award in late April at an awards ceremony held at the Museum of Flight near Seattle. 

“I’ve been in the SBA world forever,” Roth says. “When I started, I had a calculator and a pencil and a mentor.”

In a press release about the award, SBA said that Roth has assisted in delivering more than $50 million in SBA-guaranteed loans. 

During her tenure in the industry, SBA programs she’s focused on include SBA 7(a) loans, which can be used to start a new business or to acquire or expand an established business; 504 loans, which are used to buy commercial real estate, equipment, or machinery; and 8(a) contract certifications, which are set up to help businesses owned by socially or economically disadvantaged individuals. 

In her work with the Women’s Business Center, which is administered by Spokane Neighborhood Action Partners with support from the SBA, Roth has counseled more than 200 clients on starting and owning a small business. Much of that work involves instruction on networking and negotiation, in addition to financing. She also developed a quarterly newsletter with a 500-plus circulation. 

Seattle District director Nancy Porzio said in the SBA release, “Having leaders like (Roth) in our financial community is critical to the success of our state’s economy.”

While Roth received the award while working here—and in part for work performed with the Spokane organization—she’s relatively new to the Inland Northwest. 

She came to Spokane in 2012 as a senior loan officer at the Northwest Business Development Association, a Spokane-based, SBA-designated certified development company that provides 504 loans in Washington state and parts of Idaho and Washington. 

After just over a year there, she joined SNAP to help it start the Women’s Business Center. She says more than 100 similar programs operate in cities throughout the U.S., including one that started in Seattle years ago. 

The program here teaches basics on licensing and taxes, then moves on to lean startup and developing a “minimal viable product,” Roth says.

Students then work with databases available through the Spokane Public Library and with business resource librarian Mark Pond to establish a potential customer database and the beginnings of a simple customer relationship management database. Once those basics have been covered, students are introduced to ways to raise capital. In addition to SBA products, participants are taught about crowdfunding sources and other tools.

“Finance is a lot more than getting a loan now,” Roth says. 

Demand for the program has exceeded projections, she says. In the first year, the organization set the goal of having 40 people go through the program. Instead, 160 people participated and procured a total of $10,000 in loans. 

She relinquished management of day-to-day operations earlier this spring. She contends her expertise lies in getting programs or businesses up and running, then handing over management to someone else. 

While operating SBA SOS and instructing aspiring businesswomen, Roth says she’s also looking for failing businesses to acquire, something she has done several times in her career. 

A graduate of San Jose State University, she started her career in the banking industry in San Francisco, where she first became involved in SBA lending, including through work with Bay Area Development Co., which is similar in its mission to the NWBDA. 

She moved to Sacramento to help a bank there establish an SBA lending department. After getting that department going, Roth says she decided to buy her first business, a restaurant named Little Italy. She says she wasn’t looking to get into the restaurant business per se; she was looking for a struggling business to buy and had made offers on others, but the restaurant was the first to work out.

While business was slow at first, she says she stayed involved in the day-to-day operations and marketed the eatery heavily. Soon, Little Italy was bustling, and she says she bought a failing catering company. She sold both after about five years.

She says, “If I’m not buying a business and operating it, I’m in the SBA world.”

Roth first started a business named SBA SOS in Dallas in 2005, but it was incorporated separate from her current company and had a different business model. At that time, she says, she was helping lenders put together loan packages for small businesses. The SBA hadn’t converted to a paperless system yet and was taking applications that typically required a lot of paperwork. She’d fetch $1,500 per package that she prepared, she says. 

“Now, they don’t do that,” Roth says. “Anybody who can read and type and do date entry can do it. Everybody has to go through the matrix now. There are no packaging services.”

She closed down SBA SOS in Dallas in 2011.

While Roth is currently instructing with the Women’s Business Center and operating SBA SOS here, she says she might look for other opportunities in the region.

“I think the Tri-Cities could use a women’s business center,” Roth says. “Maybe I’ll go down there and start a little center.”