At the invitation-only C-Suite Roundtable at AVANCE Global in Las Vegas, Isabel Casillas Guzman talked about working in her father’s small veterinary practice in California. Every employee was a family member, and every decision was critical to keeping a small business moving forward. Decades later, she would be chosen by President Joe Biden to serve as the 27th administrator of the US Small Business Administration, serving as a voice for 34 million small businesses across the country.
Guzman took the reins of the SBA at, arguably, its most important moment in history. The COVID-19 pandemic had fundamentally reshaped the world, the Great Resignation was in full swing, and small businesses were struggling to survive. With small businesses dogged by procurement and supply chain issues, runaway inflation, and declines in small-business lending, the SBA had the opportunity either to help them find their footing or, frankly, to fail on a massive scale unseen since the Great Depression.
“I left California during the crisis—which was the fifth-largest economy at the time, and now the fourth—to lead on that COVID response and transition to the federal government,” Guzman recalls. “There was a little agency that was about $60 billion a year in funding, loans and investments, and it was suddenly catapulted to $1.2 trillion in COVID relief over those few years. It was my responsibility to come in and turn the ship.”
When history looks back at Guzman’s time at the SBA, it will see an organization that evolved at miraculous speed to meet the moment. The agency would grow to oversee a portfolio of more than $500 billion, with more than $450 billion in COVID relief deployed in her first year alone.
“I led under crisis, under extreme duress. That’s where the passion and centered focus on the end user—the customer, the small-business owner whom I knew so well as a founder myself and as the daughter of an entrepreneur—came into play,” Guzman explains. “That passion, and then that hard-work ethic: being willing to go deep on what was now a massive portfolio, huge decisions around PPP forgiveness and at least seven new programs that we suddenly had to launch overnight with strong performance and controls. Those two things served me well in the crisis management.”
Today, the entrepreneur, government leader, and policy expert is the founder and president of Avenida Advisors, a strategic advisory and consulting firm where Guzman has the opportunity to accelerate business growth at what she calls “the intersection of public-private partnerships,” while continuing to think about the evolving idea of what constitutes a “small business” and how such businesses can compete in the new world we’re living in.
Guzman says her positivity—her belief in small-business owners—makes it impossible to dwell on tough economic moments. She wants to inspire, she wants to help, and she wants to be of service to people like her father, someone building their own business to support their family and make a better life.
That’s why, along with her speaking appearances, she’s at AVANCE Global.
“I came to learn. I came to network. I came to be a resource,” Guzman says. “I’m so inspired by the stories I hear. [The summit] gives me fuel to keep on going.”
