Grant Writing with Stormi Banks

Story banks is the founder and CEO of pink print firm. They are a grant writing organization empowering businesses by unlocking access to funding. Welcome to the show, Stormy.

Stormi Banks 1:40
Thank you. Thanks for having me. I appreciate that.

george grombacher 1:43
Yeah, excited to have you on tell us a little about your personal lives, more about your work and why you do what you do.

Stormi Banks 1:49
Personal life. You know, I haven’t had one as much since I’ve been building this brand. I’m sure a lot of startup founders can agree. I’ve been, like, super obsessive and focused on just building the company and doing our mission. I think I got inspired by this work simply by seeing the need. It was like during that time where covid was really, you know, demolishing a lot of businesses financially, and a lot of people were going towards, like loans and credit cards. And I was like, oh, there’s a lot of grants that they’re giving out right now. We need to try to find these other opportunities. And so started off honestly, just education we were doing, like free zoom classes, in person classes in New York. And then people would say, Well, can you do the application for us? Can you do this for us? And ended up turning into us answering the call for the need that was there, and now it’s turned into, you know, multi million dollar grant writing firm. So it’s pretty cool to see it all happen in real time for

george grombacher 2:51
sure. You know, I don’t know that I have a very cursory, cursory understanding of grants, and that’s just because I have a friend that was in the business for a little while. How did you come to even realize that they were a thing,

Stormi Banks 3:04
the need for myself? You know, I was in a position where I just simply did not have proper credit or proper revenue to get the funds that I was needing traditionally. And so that’s when I hit a crazy Google search, right? And I’m just deep, diving into the rabbit holes of other opportunities that are out there for small businesses. And I’m finding all these different things. And grants pops up one day, and I went on, it was the like, congressional hearing they were talking about all the money they were giving out in the state. And I was like, wow, they’re giving out billions of dollars. Where, how do I find this stuff, right? And so I just went on, like, grants.gov, and started finding these opportunities. And I’m like, oh, okay, this is pretty cool. I can write something such as a resume, almost about the business, and articulate myself in a way where someone would infuse capital into my business that I didn’t have to pay back. I said, that’s a win, win, if you ask me. Yeah, that sounds like a pretty good deal. Yeah, so that’s how I kind of got into it.

george grombacher 4:05
You’re like, wait what? Okay, so, and like, what? What is the grant universe look like? Is there money available for just about everything? Is it narrow? It’s

Stormi Banks 4:16
so vast, it’s insane. Actually, the things that I see that people will infuse capital into you know, there’s so many people who have been through so many things in life, and so with the understanding that they also have this mission, and they’ve raised money, or they’ve gotten funded from the government, and now they’re kind of dispersing it to small businesses to help them push their mission, or individuals, it’s just so vast. There’s grants for small businesses, there’s grants for individuals, grants for, you know, religious communities. It’s just it’s so vast. And

george grombacher 4:51
where does the money come from? Yeah, it’s, it

Stormi Banks 4:54
can be like private funding. So it can be like private corporations or foundations. A lot of times it’s also the state will give out the money, or it’s the federal government who’s giving out the money, and they’re typically putting it with, you know, different departments who then disperse it locally, or private foundations who have raised capital through donations and fundraisers who are then now giving grants out. So there’s a few different sources, and

george grombacher 5:20
the idea is that, let’s say that we’re in the state of Minnesota, and Minnesota decides, you know, we have a shortage of of educators and or we recognize as a problem. We want to address this problem. We’re going to make money available. And so they say, Hey, we’re offering grants for this thing, anybody can apply.

Stormi Banks 5:42
Yep, exactly. They’ll have like, a eligibility. They’ll say, you have to meet these requirements. You know, maybe that’s 18 years and older US based live in Minnesota, you know, have a small business registered. And then they’ll say, fill out this application online, which typically is about 10 to 15 questions, answering questions about your mission. How do you do it? What makes you different? Your budget, things of that nature. And then from there, judges will essentially take all the applicants and say who were the best five or the best 10 from this pile. This is who will be awarded the money.

george grombacher 6:19
Okay, so I imagine that early on, it was less competitive, and today it’s probably a lot more competitive,

Stormi Banks 6:26
as people are learning about the opportunity. Yes, the competition is going up heavily, but I still think that a lot of people do not have the skill set to really articulate themselves properly for what a grant is looking for. And so what I’m seeing is that I’ve been a judge on a couple of grants that we’ve offered, and offered, you know, with other organizations, they’re simple things like grammar that are really eliminating people. They’re simple things like not answering the question in depth, because if you’re imagining I don’t know you, and you don’t know me, right? If I’m going to get a full scope of who you are, you have to elaborate. You have to give me all the detail. I can’t be left with questions after reading your grant proposal or application, because I’m not going to call you there is. It’s not like an interview process. So we’re just taking the paperwork and this is what we’re going off of. So I just find that there’s a lack of people really understanding what’s required to be successful with grants.

george grombacher 7:28
In a lot of ways, I think when you hear there’s 15 questions or 2010, questions or whatever, you think, Oh, that’s really easy, but in reality, it’s probably way harder when it’s fewer, because you’re needing to do what you just said in a very short amount of time or words?

Stormi Banks 7:44
Yeah, you have to understand. What are the meat and potatoes that they really need to know? And how can I do that, not only in 10 questions, but also with 200 characters or 150 characters. And so that’s where the skill of writing has really come in the creativity of being able to tell about someone’s business, elaborate on it, but do it concise and creative to where it also intrigues the reader. If you can imagine, if I’ve read 1000 applicants, they all start to blend together and blur together, and so when I get one that just pops off with their story and with the passion and with the excitement and a really clear mission and vision of where they’re looking to go. It’s just a no brainer. So those are, like the things that we have infused into our writing process to help small businesses, you know, eliminate some of the barrier to entry.

george grombacher 8:35
I also and you can tell me, just tell me when I’m wrong about this, this, this stuff, but when all of a sudden I have chat GBT, and I can open up and I can say, Hey, can you give me write a grant proposal for XYZ? And it spits it out. That just makes your job even more valuable, because there’s probably so many people that are just lazy and doing that,

Stormi Banks 8:55
yeah, there’s been a lot of conversation about, is AI going to take over, you know, our industry, and the good thing about it is, at this point, AI can’t articulate passion. They can’t articulate human emotion as much as we would want it to. It can give you some guidelines to help you write. I say, use AI for prompting you for like that writer’s block, but you cannot use AI to write a full proposal. They actually have tools now, like zero GPT that a lot of you know, grant organizations that are giving out funds are utilizing to see is this proposal AI written because what they’re wanting to do is give it to people who have done the work to articulate themselves and present themselves on their own behalf, you know. So that’s a big thing in the grant writing industry.

george grombacher 9:45
So there’s a lot of things in life, maybe all of them, whether it’s an art and a science and the art is obviously what you’ve just been describing. How do I explain what I do in a way that is attention grabbing, but succinct and gets the gets the job done? The science is not everybody’s going to get these, and so I probably need to have some kind of a strategy that says, don’t just apply for one and then think that I’m going to get it.

Stormi Banks 10:09
Yeah, that’s so good because our strategy we use, it’s called a boiler plate, so it’s essentially one proposal that templates most of the questions you’re going to see on applications. We use that as like a baseline for every grant that we’re applying to. So it helps us apply quicker, because on every application, we don’t have to think of a new thing to say. We’re just using the copy and paste method and like you know, changing up a few things as necessary to align with the grants mission. And so our goal is that people apply to one grant a day. We say one grant a day keeps the debt away. And so if you can be consistent in your approach, you will find that you’re winning consistently. Because grants, there’s no limit on how many you can win. So if you apply to 30 in a month, you can win two or five or 10. You know there’s no limit. And so we just tell people to consistently apply. I know one a day is kind of, you know, overreaching, right, for the average person, but try to get in, you know, two applications a week, and you’ll see some success rolling out for sure.

george grombacher 11:14
And is it, there’s grants for hundreds of dollars, and then grants for 1000s of dollars.

Stormi Banks 11:19
It goes up to the millions. It goes up to the millions. So you can find micro grants as low as $100 250 500 and then you can find for specific projects that they’re doing, you know, multi million dollar grants for transportation, construction, medical education, all of those different things. Mental health has been a big one. Staff development, workforce development has been a huge one as well. So it ranges so far.

george grombacher 11:49
So for people who are listening, obviously, how do I know if what I’m doing I’m I’m a business owner, should I be considering this?

Stormi Banks 12:01
Yeah, I think that you should be considering it at all points. You know, debt free funding is so vital because your revenue, You increased your revenue by not having to pay someone back, right? So you should always be considering, is there a grant for me? And then also, I think that you should be considering it if you’re at the point where you don’t have to have a revenue requirement, but you have a very clear vision of where you’re looking to go in the next three to five years. You also have a very clear mission for your business. So I know for me, we serve minority business owners. We help them get debt free capital. That’s what we do. That’s everything about our business. And so if you can’t really explain to someone in elevator pitch what your business does and get them excited about it, I don’t think you’re grant ready. And then there’s documentation processes, right? So you need to have your your business bank account. You need to make sure you have, like, a website, some social media. I know you look me up on LinkedIn. Grant, grant organizations are doing the same thing, they want to feel like you’re doing what you say you’re doing. So some digital footprint is helpful as well. And I think those are kind of some of the starting guidelines on when you are grant ready,

george grombacher 13:11
which obviously makes sense. You know, whoever’s giving the grant, if it’s a individual or a foundation or the government, they want to make sure that there’s not going to be fraud, because There’s fraud everywhere in every walk of life. So yep,

Stormi Banks 13:25
exactly, yeah. And they’ve implemented some things too, where some grants will have you kind of report back, you know, they’ll give the money to you in draws, so they’ll be like, Okay, once you’ve spent 5000 and we can go over the budget, and we can see that the progression has been done, then we’ll release the next you know, amount of funding. So there’s some that do that to prevent some of that as well, but the ones who don’t, they’re doing a little bit more research on your digital footprint and your mission, and so that’ll be important for you to make sure you have that.

george grombacher 13:58
That makes sense, all right, so I need to have a functioning business. I need I need the bank accounts, any website. I need social media. I just need to be a going concern, something that’s actually taking place, and then to be able to articulate my vision and mission. And that’s one of those things that you could say, you need to have a vision and mission. But I don’t know that everybody understands exactly how to, how to sort of put that together, think about it, and then to actually articulate it.

Stormi Banks 14:28
Yeah. So for me, they go hand in hand, because your vision is what you’re looking to do in the future. So you need to be able to say, Okay, our goal is to, you know, in homelessness in Georgia, right? Our goal is to completely eliminate homelessness in Georgia, and then your mission is kind of the day to day on how you’re doing that. So we serve the homeless community in Georgia by providing housing for affordable pricing and whatever that may look like, right? And so when you’re putting those two things together, it’s really understanding, how are you doing what you say you’re going to do, and then how far can you take that with the vehicle that you’re using that would be the vision. So those are kind of the things that will help you navigate how to produce a mission and a vision statement for your business. And they don’t have to be long. These are like two sentences at the most. It’s not a huge long paragraph, but it needs to be clear.

george grombacher 15:25
Yeah, certainly. And then having the, I think you said boilerplate, some kind of a template. How long if I am doing one a day to keep the debt away, how long am I spending, typically, to customize my my template for the new opportunity?

Stormi Banks 15:47
Yeah, of course, there’s going to be a learning curve, right? So your first view, I would imagine it’s taking anyone you know from anywhere from 20 to 35 minutes, just if you have that boilerplate, if you’re going with nothing, then it’s going to take you about an hour to think of everything to say, but once you kind of get the hand, the handle of it, and you understand how the applications look, honestly, we’re applying in 15 minutes, right? And this is how we’re able to keep consistency. But I do think that you have to go and apply to see how the process looks, because some people think that grants are daunting because they’ve never opened an application. And if you’re actually running a legitimate business, most of the questions you probably can answer, you know, now. And so the easiest thing to do, answer the question. Talk it out, like they have these AIs now, where you can talk and it will transcribe for you. Talk it out. Talk to your friend, you know, answer the question as if you’re talking to your friend. Have the AI, the bot, transcribe it, and then all you need to do is condense it into the proper, you know, word count, make sure the grammar is good, and then kind of change up some words for a little more excitement. And then you’ve got the answer, you know.

george grombacher 16:59
And how do I how do I even get started? How do I start searching? How do I identify different opportunities to apply for

Stormi Banks 17:06
absolutely, I think that a lot of people are using like Google, and they find that it’s hard to find grants because Google, you’ll go you’ll go on Google and type like grants for women, and it’ll be ads out the galore. So you need to use actual grant databases that are compiled of different opportunities that are available for people who are looking for grants, and not a bunch of ads. So we use grantwatch.com on a daily basis, and we love grants.gov it’s a little less user friendly, but it’s still really good, informational wise, and then hello, skip has been a really helpful tool as well. Hello, skip.com. Is what we use, mostly for like for profit business owners, because for profit and nonprofit can win grants. Nice, is

george grombacher 17:52
there anybody that shouldn’t be considering this?

Stormi Banks 17:57
Anyone that should not be considering this? I would say, honestly, know if you’re an individual, you’re going to find less grant opportunities, like, if you haven’t started the business yet, there will be less opportunities for you. If you’re an individual and you’re like, Hey, I just am a swim instructor and I want to get some grants for my program. You can find grants for that, but trying to go under a small business, then, of course, that wouldn’t really work. So I would just say you’re pretty much good if you have a business and you’re operating and you’re looking to grow and scale nice,

george grombacher 18:30
and who should come talk with you, and and, and what do you take them from soup to nuts? Kind of tell us about about your process.

Stormi Banks 18:40
Yeah, our process is, we like people to be grant ready. So come to us when you’re like, Hey, we are grant ready. We’ve got the checklist done, and now we are just wanting to hire someone to take over the time that it takes to research, to write, to articulate this to, you know, help us apply to grants. Because our service, we do the full process of the writing to the actual application as well. And so if you are, you know a woman in business, if you have a small business or a nonprofit, and you are looking to get some capital infused into your business and you want to do it debt free, then we would be able to help you navigate how that process works. Excellent.

george grombacher 19:20
And how do they find you? Yeah,

Stormi Banks 19:23
they can find us. Our website is Pinkprint firm.com www.pinkprintfirm.com and you can find us across all social platforms under the same and our contact information and our email is all on our website. Excellent,

george grombacher 19:37
well, Stormy. Thank you so much for coming back on. Give us the website one more time, please.

Stormi Banks 19:43
Sure it’s pink print firm.com,

george grombacher 19:47
excellent. If you enjoyed as much as I did, show storm of your appreciation. Share today’s show with a friend who also appreciates good ideas, or somebody that you know that is in business and they’ve got such a wonderful thing that they’re going on, but they’re just not quite where they want to be, or they’re already where they want to be, but they’re trying to go a little further. Just spread the word about this awesome opportunity. Go to Pinkprint firm.com, check out everything that storm has been talking about today. Thanks again, stormy, thank you until next time, remember do your part by doing your best. Great job. Stormy. Thank you. Great

Stormi Banks 20:23
questions. Right to the point,

george grombacher 20:25
right, right to the point.

Stormi Banks 20:27
I love that.

george grombacher 20:29
It was awesome. I appreciate it makes me wonder if I should be applying to grants too. So

Stormi Banks 20:35
seriously, there’s a lot, lots for podcasts, lots for production, creatives, all that stuff is out there, for sure.

george grombacher 20:43
I actually do. I do financial wellness. I’m a speaker, and I’m a financial advisor also, and I’ve been doing it for 25 years. I don’t know if there’s other grants available for that kind of

Stormi Banks 20:55
thing. Absolutely, absolutely, yeah, you can find a ton. I would start on the Hello, skip platform. It seems to be the most you know, user friendly for people who are getting started and more attractive, and they have tons of grants. They’ve committed to having a million dollars worth of grants on their website at one time. So that’s good, nice.

george grombacher 21:14
And you only work with with with women.

Stormi Banks 21:18
We work with men as well. We front face with women entrepreneurs, but we do have a lot of male clients as well. Okay,

george grombacher 21:25
well, if I check it out and I ping you back, is this something we could work together on or not? Absolutely?

Stormi Banks 21:30
Yeah, absolutely, yeah, that would be great. All right, cool. We’ll

george grombacher 21:34
let you know when we’re going live with this episode. It’ll be within maybe even next week, but I’ll let you know for sure the exact date, and obviously I’ll copy on all the social media posts and all that good stuff and love to keep in touch.

Stormi Banks 21:47
So awesome. Thanks so much, George has been a pleasure.

george grombacher 21:50
It was great meeting with you. Have a great day. YouTube bye bye.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

george grombacher 16:00
So if I want my iPhone, and my Tesla and my Bitcoin to work, we need to get the metal out of the ground.

Pierre Leveille 16:07
Absolutely. Without it, we cannot do it.

george grombacher 16:13
Why? Why is there a Why has production been going down.

Pierre Leveille 16:21
Because the large mines that are producing most of the copper in the world, the grades are going down slowly they’re going there, they’re arriving near the end of life. So and of life of mines in general means less production. And in the past, at least 15 years, the exploration expenditure for copper were pretty low, because the price of copper was low. And when the price is low, companies are tending to not invest more so much in exploration, which is what we see today. It’s it’s, it’s not the way to look at it. Because nobody 15 years ago was able to predict that there would be a so massive shortage, or it’s so massive demand coming. But in the past five years, or let’s say since the since 10 years, we have seen that more and more coming. And then the by the time you react start exploring and there’s more money than then ever that is putting in put it in expression at the moment for copper at least. And what we see is that the it takes time, it could take up to 2025 years between the time you find a deposit that it gets in production. So but but the year the time is counted. So it’s it’s very important to so you will see company reopening old mines, what it will push also, which is not bad, it will force to two, it will force to find a it will force to find ways of recalibrating customer, you know the metals, that will be more and more important.

george grombacher 18:07
So finding, okay, so for lack of a better term recycling metals that are just sitting around somewhere extremely important. Yeah. And then going and going back to historic minds that maybe for lack of technology, or just lack of will or reasons, but maybe now because there’s such a demand, there’s an appetite to go back to those.

Pierre Leveille 18:33
Yes, but there will be a lot of failures into that for many reasons. But the ones that will be in that will resume mining it’s just going to be a short term temporary solution. No it’s it’s not going to be you need to find deposit that will that will operate 50 years you know at least it’s 25 to 50 years at least and an old mind that you do in production in general it’s less than 10 years.

george grombacher 19:03
Got it. Oh there we go. Up here. People are ready for your difference making tip What do you have for them

Pierre Leveille 19:14
You mean an investment or

george grombacher 19:17
whatever you’re into, you’ve got so much life experience with raising a family and doing business all over the world and having your kids go to school in Africa so a tip on copper or whatever you’re into.

Pierre Leveille 19:34
But there’s two things I like to see and I was telling my children many times and I always said you know don’t focus on what will bring you specifically money don’t think of Getting Rich. Think of doing what you what you like, what you feel your your your your your, you know you have been born to do so use your most you skills, do what you like, do what you wet well, and good things will happen to you. And I can see them grow in their life. And I can tell you that this is what happens. And sometimes you have setback like I had recently. But if we do things properly, if we do things that we like, and we liked that project, we were very passionate about that project, not only me, all my team, and if we do things properly, if we do things correctly, good things will happen. And we will probably get the project back had to go forward or we will find another big project that will be the launch of a new era. So that’s my most important tip in life. Do what you like, do it with your best scale and do it well and good things will happen.

george grombacher 20:49
Pierre Leveille 21:03
Thank you. I was happy to be with you to today.

george grombacher 21:06
Damn, tell us the websites and where where people can connect and find you.

Pierre Leveille 21:13
The it’s Deep South resources.com. So pretty simple.

george grombacher 21:18
Perfect. Well, if you enjoyed this as much as I did show up here your appreciation and share today’s show with a friend who also appreciate good ideas, go to deep south resources, calm and learn all about what they’re working on and track their progress.

Pierre Leveille 21:32
Thanks. Thanks, have a nice day.

george grombacher 21:36
And until next time, keep fighting the good fight. We’re all in this together.