Ka Wai Ola - Office of Hawaiian Affairs, Volume 8, Number 10, 1 October 1991 — Tax service business soars with loan award [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

Tax service business soars with loan award

by Gail Chun To put it bluntly, Janet Ha'ole said she needed a loan because she wanted her bookkeeping and tax service business to go "from one person to many." "I hadn't intended to go into business for myself, but I had more clients that I could handle," she said. But banks turned Ha'ole down because of a bad credit record she inherited from a previous marriage. So, she searched for alternative sources. She applied for a state of Hawai'i direct loan, a small business administration loan, and to the Office of Hawaiian Affairs (OHA) Native Hawaiian Revolving Loan Fund. Ha'ole became one of OHA's first revolving loan fund recipients back in 1988. "The fact that it was geared toward Native Hawaiians really interested me," she said. "And the interest rate was the lowest of the three." With this loan she went into business with some family members and located her office at 1529 Kalakaua Ave. Three years later, her business has expanded into two branches, the other in Kailua, and she has, five people working under her. Her mother works at the Kailua branch. "It's great," she said. "Before, I used to work out of my apartment. Part of my daughter's room was my office. "Now, we have a real home. The only thing there that resembles an office is the lap top computer I take home when I need to. And, of course, my daughter loves it." Her clientele grew from 25 to 300, and her gross ineome has quadrupied. She has also affiliated the company, then called Professional Bookkeeping and Word Processing, ine. with Triple Check ineome Tax Services, a national bookkeepinq and

tax company, and assumed their name. "They give national support," she said. "It also makes running the business easier, because of the technical nature of the work we do. "And, as a small business, it is hard to keep up todate all the time. Now with an nahonal organization, there are formal training programs, conferences for updates in the field, and because of systems designed by Triple Check, I don't have to do everything. "They are always there," she said. This is important for her business, Ha'ole said, because her time is billable, and she doesn't want to waste time on things a non-technical employee ean do. All this adds up to a highly successful company and reputation. And especially, she said she has more of a personal life and more time to get involved with organizations. "I make it a point for

people to get to know me," she said. Ha'ole is a member of the National Society of Public Accountants, the National Society of Tax Practitioners, the Amenean Institution of Professional Bookkeepers, and the Americani Marketing Association. She is also a member of the Small Business Administration (SBA), and as a member of the Women in Business committee under SBA, helps to put on yearly conferences. She also gives lectures and teaches classes when she ean. "Public speaking was difficult for me to !earn. At my first speech, I had the entire speech written out on index cards, and I was going to drop eaeh one as I used them into a drawer of a file cabinet that my podium was on, so that the audience would never know that I was using index cards. "Well, after the first card, I dropped all of them. So I had to wing it. It ended up to be a good lesson for me, that you just have to wing it when it comes to public speaking. It comes out better that way," she said. Most of Triple Check's clientele are small businesses. "In Hawai'i, almost every business that is not a national corporation is a small business (where the gross ineome is less that $5 million a year)," she said. "That is about 67 percent, according to SBA stats. And that's a lot. We focus on travel, law firms, and transport business companies." Ha'ole said the only way she would like to expand her business by changing the location of her present Kalakaua office to "a street level, ground floor location. "In terms of quality, I think we are on the high end," she said.

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