National Small Business Advising Program Launched By Pacific Community Ventures

SAN FRANCISCO - June 5, 2014 - PRLog -- San Francisco based nonprofit, Pacific Community Ventures, announces the launch of a brand new website aimed at supporting small business owners on a national level. The website, www.BusinessAdvising.org, matches small business owners located in, or hiring from, low-moderate income communities across the nation with expert-level volunteer business advisors. This one-on-one business support helps small businesses achieve sustainable and profitable scale while creating quality jobs that offer living wages, benefits and opportunities for career advancement.

For the past 16 years, Pacific Community Ventures (PCV) has been matching local brick-and-mortar businesses with volunteer business advisors in the San Francisco Bay Area, where the PCV offices are based. During this time, over 3,000 small businesses and 30,000 employees have been supported, the majority of whom live in low-to-moderate income neighborhoods. In 2013 alone, over $68 million in wages were paid to these employees who live in lower-income communities. By harnessing the power of technology to connect people across geographies, PCV has launched BusinessAdvising.org to provide business support to entrepreneurs in cities that might not have these resources nearby.

The newly launched www.BusinessAdvising.orgfeatures a quick, user-friendly sign-up process for entrepreneurs and volunteer business advisors alike, which then filters into a sophisticated algorithm that produces the right match based on a business’s needs and advisors’ skill-sets.

Typically, business consulting for small business owners can be expensive and out of reach, costing an average of about $150 per hour. Each match on BusinessAdvising.org costs $99, includes up to five hours of advising per month, and is satisfaction guaranteed – if for some reason a match isn’t working, an entrepreneur will be re-matched with a new advisor free of charge.

About Pacific Community Ventures: Pacific Community Ventures was launched in 1998 by former Silicon Valley executives who believed that small businesses in underserved communities should have easier access to the high-caliber advice and capital that revolutionized the high-tech industry. PCV’s services include advice and capital to help small businesses succeed, and impact evaluation and research and policy services to propel the impact economy forward. PCV’s unique ecosystem of programs work together to create economic opportunity in low-income communities.  For more information on Pacific Community Venture’s Business Advising Program, contact: Kendra Ott, Associate Director, BusinessAdvising.org, Kott@pcvmail.org.