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Value Innovation Technologies Corp
222 South Church Street Suite 326M Charlotte, NC 28202
http://www.valueinnovationtech.com
Cy Kennedy
CEO
CyKennedy@ValueInnovationTech.com
+1 (704) 296-2987
Yes
Ray Kennedy: Ray is a co-founder and Chairman of VIT. Ray has over 35 years of entrepreneurial experience and has founded over 10 businesses, including American Product Distributors, Inc., which, at the time, was one of the largest African American-owned businesses in the United States. Ray spent25 years in the banking industry, becoming Executive Vice President of Operations for Southern National Bank, a predecessor to the current Truist Bank, Ray holds a bachelor’s degree in business administration from the University of Maryland Eastern Shore, an MBA from North Carolina Central University, and completed executive education at the Graduate School of Banking at LSU and the UNC Chapel Hill Executive Program. Juanita Richardson directs all technical support for VIT, its clients, and its vendors. Juanita has expertise in managing site uptime, vendor and customer integration, EDI management and configuration, managing off-site data, and AWS maintenance. Juanita has over 30 years of technical experience and holds a Bachelor’s degree in accounting from Kings College. Jonathan Nash, Jr., Esq. (UPenn Law Graduate ’94 and teaching assistant at the Wharton Business School)– Jonathan is a small business advocate and VIT Sr. Advisor. Jonathan is a native North Omaha business owner who has advocated for, advised, supported, started, and/or invested seed capital in small businesses for nearly thirty (30) years. Dr. Winslow Sargeant is a small business advocate and VIT Sr. Advisor. During the Obama administration, Winslow was the Chief Counsel for Advocacy for the US Small Business Administration Washington, DC Office. Winslow is currently Senior Advisor for Globalization and Head of Capital Markets for GENAESIS, LLC and is also the current Chair of the International Council of Small Business. Mark currently serves as the managing partner for Greenview Taylor. This firm specializes in providing strategic direction, visionary leadership, and executive business development for companies looking to sell to government clients. As a successful entrepreneur for more than twenty-three (23) years, Mr. Newsome has founded and scaled a handful of small businesses that, collectively, earned over $100M in revenues. His expertise is achieving business objectives with limited capital, quickly pivoting business strategy, and avoiding existential threats. Mr. Newsome holds a BA in Accounting from North Carolina Central University and an MBA from St. Ambrose University. He also completed executive education programs at the University of Texas at El Paso and the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College.
Cy Kennedy is a co-founder and CEO of VIT and has led the company since its creation. Cy is a seasoned executive with over 20 years of C-Suite experience. Prior to leading VIT, Cy spent many years as an executive (including 7 years as President) of American Product Distributors, Inc., VIT’s former parent company. Cy also spent several years in corporate and investment banking with Bank of America. Cy holds a Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics from Morehouse College and an MBA with a concentration in Finance and Entrepreneurship from Wake Forest University. Ben Gray: Ben is the Managing Director of the Omaha Digital Marketplace, a local VIT ambassador, and a local business advisor. As the councilman representing District 2 for twelve years, Ben advocated for North Omaha small businesses and authored the Omaha Small Emerging Business Ordinance, created to stimulate the growth of small and emerging businesses in Omaha, with special attention to stimulating economic growth in areas having high levels of poverty. Ben’s efforts have contributed to and laid the groundwork for small business growth in North Omaha. Eva Dinion is a co-founder of VIT and is responsible for the performance and ongoing development for the entire all eLink™ platform. Eva was instrumental in the development of the eLink™ platform and its predecessor system. With 40 plus years of experience managing technology and operations teams, Eva is an expert at ensuring the timely completion of highly complex technical projects. Prior to joining VIT, Eva was SVP – Operations and Technology for American Product Distributors, Inc., VIT’s former parent company. Eva also spent approximately 20 years in technology and operations for Southern National Bank, which was acquired by BB&T. Eva holds a Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration from Wake Forest University and is a graduate of the School of Banking at the University of Wisconsin. Bong is VIT’s System Architect. He is responsible for the architecture of the eLink platform and for maintaining the infrastructure that supports the eLink platform. He has over 20 years of experience in managing IT in various roles spanning IT Architecture, Development, Infrastructure Operations, Software Configuration Management, and Application Lifecycle Management. Bong is a technically experienced professional, who has developed strong technical management qualifications with hands-on IS, project and team management expertise. Prasad Thumu is the head programmer at VIT. He is responsible for writing code and overseeing the implementation of code written by other developers. With 14 years of experience in the IT industry, Prasad has expertise in a broad range of technologies, including Java/J2EE, Web Services, Design patterns, Struts and Spring Framework, and many others. Prasad is a certified Java programmer and holds a Master’s degree and a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Andhra University in India. VIT’s key management team has over 100 years of combined experience in building and maintaining customized electronic catalogs to guide shopping behavior to achieve strategic goals. The eLink platform was developed in 2016 to upgrade to a predecessor eCommerce platform the VIT team developed. The VIT team has built and maintained e-commerce catalogs for large government and commercial enterprises, including Walmart, Northrop Grumman, the City of Cincinnati, the US Postal Service, Johnson & Johnson, Pepsico, and many others. The eLink platform has managed over $300 million in transactions from over 100,000 users, and VIT has loaded millions of products into customized shopping catalogs for clients. Examples of the work we’ve done are as follows: allow large institutions to buy from small, local businesses online. This marketplace is currently live and has approximately 50,000 items for sale from local vendors. Some of the largest organizations in the northern Chicago area are committed subscribing
Omaha Digital Marketplace
6500000.0
5500000.0
Service/program
VIT is an award-winning SaaS technology and business process automation company. Our patented electronic marketplace platform (eLink) is used for building, hosting, and maintaining customized multi-vendor online shopping marketplaces. Value Innovation Technologies Corp (VIT) requests $5.5 million to implement a customized online shopping marketplace for Omaha’s small and emerging businesses. According to the SBA, only about 64% of small businesses in the United States even have a website. A much smaller percentage have a fully functional e-commerce system capable of integrating with a large organization’s procurement system. This problem is even more acute for small businesses in economically disadvantaged communities. Through the Omaha Digital Marketplace, businesses can sell products (and potentially services) to large local companies, institutions, and government entities. As online marketplaces often require complex and costly software and technological frameworks, small businesses often experience difficulty selling to large companies, government entities, and institutions. VIT will provide technical assistance to small businesses that sell products in the marketplaces by customizing the Omaha Digital Marketplace, recruiting large buyers to purchase from the marketplace and recruiting local small businesses to sell. Establishing a local VIT office will support the maintenance and expansion of this project. Should VIT receive this grant award, the marketplace will facilitate purchases within approximately six months after funding. The Omaha Digital Marketplace will be a self-sufficient project within five years of funding.
Funding – November 2022. Begin with marketplace customizations – January 2023. Begin to recruit anchor institutional buyers – Already begun (October 2022). Begin to recruit vendors – February 2023. Hire and train local employees – March 2023. Train and assist local vendors in digitizing their product offerings – April – June 2023. Complete system integration with anchor institutional buyers – June 2023. Load products of initial set of local vendors – June 2023. Open Omaha Digital Marketplace for business on a test basis – July 2023. Open Omaha Digital Marketplace for business on a live basis – October 2023. Continued recruiting/training of vendors – Ongoing. Continued recruiting of institutional buyers – Ongoing.
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Long-Lasting Economic Growth (i.e., a proposal that will foster gainful employment opportunities and financial investment in the area, leading to the creation of generational wealth and widespread economic vitality in North and South Omaha)
Quality of Life (i.e., create or enhance natural spaces, mixed uses, parks, safety, etc.) Sustainable Community (i.e., create or enhance housing, services, education, civic uses, recreation, etc.)
Creating a state-of-the-art platform connecting buyers and sellers contributes to their long-term and short-term sales and competitiveness. With the support of this funding, VIT can drive meaningful economic activity to small and emerging Omaha businesses, increasing their financial sustainability and catalyzing job creation, community investment, and social vitality. The proposed Omaha Digital Marketplace promotes the growth and competitiveness of Omaha’s community through leveraging the insight of community members and VIT’s expertise to manage and support eCommerce, increasing the visibility of local businesses and sales. Research demonstrates that technology transfer is critical to the long-term inclusivity of businesses. However, many small businesses cannot finance the human capital and infrastructure needed to build or participate in a sophisticated eCommerce platform. eLink™ Gateway has a state-of-the-art online shopping interface that is user-friendly, efficient, and inviting for shoppers. As this platform is already developed, it is customizable and configurable in a format designed for swift implementation. VIT will provide local businesses with a high-functioning marketplace without employing additional talent to code, offer system support, or high development or maintenance costs. We project the marketplace will generate over $163 million in incremental economic activity for Omaha by 2028. We anticipate that increasing economic activity will positively impact community health through the following: -increased sales generate wealth for local business owners, -profitable businesses increase the amount of capital for community reinvestment, including infrastructure and transportation etc. -job creation -contributing to ongoing efforts to provide opportunities for skill expansion for community members to access higher wages. Furthermore, the Omaha Digital Marketplace will position local businesses to participate in the $6.7 trillion business-to-business US market, a tremendous opportunity for local companies. eLink™ Gateway fosters market inclusivity in Omaha and promotes and immediately increases the visibility of participating local businesses. There are no comprehensive and accessible platforms to identify and support local businesses. The Omaha Digital Marketplace surpasses a database-approach that simply references businesses in a defined locale. This Omaha Digital Marketplace can facilitate all interactions between interested buyers and sellers, increasing the community's visibility and utilization. In addition, VIT can use iconography to identify the businesses such as women-owned businesses, tribal-affiliated businesses, veteran-owned businesses, etc. In addition, implementing the Omaha Digital Marketplace combats network exclusion “that can arise due to normal business operating procedures, often dictated by the desire to work with companies that have prior experience, demonstrated work product, and a solid reputation” (MBDA 2016 Review of Existing Disparity Studies). The connective capabilities of this project increase networking opportunities, contract access, and expand social capital to boost local commerce and generate wealth for community members.
The aims of the Omaha Digital Marketplace align with the findings shared in the Visioning Workshop Summary by providing small businesses in the North Omaha and South Omaha areas access to meaningful business-to-business online sales opportunities. This overarching support for local small and emerging businesses generates the following benefits that were mentioned repeatedly in the Visioning Workshop Summary: -Creation of High-paying Jobs – The businesses that grow as a result of the new revenue opportunities will hire more local employees to support their growth. In addition, VIT will create approximately ten high paying jobs to support the Omaha Digital Marketplace. -Local Business Education/Training/Development – VIT will provide technical and operational support and training for local businesses to help them to sell their products to large organizations online. This includes helping them to digitize their product offering, professionalize the delivery of their products, and other business-to-business skill sets. These skills will help local business owners to grow their businesses through the Omaha Digital Marketplace and beyond the Omaha Digital Marketplace. Improving the Circulation of Money in the Community – Creating more sales for local businesses helps communities to keep dollars in their area longer, which benefits the entire community. Favorable Media Coverage – VIT will engage in marketing activities to strengthenmedia coverage to the North Omaha and South Omaha communities.
The Omaha Digital Marketplace will generate the following benefits for the Omaha community: -Omaha Digital Marketplace will drive substantial economic growth for small businesses in the North Omaha and South Omaha communities by giving them access to large clients that are otherwise hard for these small businesses to reach. -VIT estimates over $163 million in incremental economic activity for Omaha by 2028. -The Omaha Digital Marketplace will return economic benefits of 3.25 times the requested grant amount by 2024 and nearly 30 times the amount granted by 2028. -VIT will create approximately ten well-paying permanent jobs for Omaha residents. VIT estimates hiring ten employees in the Omaha area to perform operational roles that pay annual compensation of roughly $50,000 per year.
VIT anticipates creating approximately 10 new permanent jobs that will pay an average of $50,000 per year.
VIT anticipates creating approximately 10 new permanent jobs that will pay an average of $50,000 per year.
The jobs VIT creates will immediately provide a reasonable wage for community members. In addition, these employees will learn marketable career skills in project management, business development, e-commerce, and some technical skills, such as Excel and the details of the eLink platform and other online applications.
The community will benefit from the Omaha Digital Marketplace through increased sales for local businesses and new high-paying jobs. Small and emerging businesses will be able to access a client base they would otherwise have difficulty reaching. Large businesses, government entities, and institutions use sophisticated procurement systems and have set processes for how to make purchases. Small and emerging businesses usually don’t have the resources or technical expertise to meet these requirements. In addition, the sales cycle to sell to large organizations is long. The Omaha Digital Marketplace eliminates these problems by giving small and emerging businesses immediate access to selling to large organizations. They don’t have to pay for an expensive e-commerce system or deal with cumbersome procurement rules. Through the Omaha Digital Marketplace, they can receive non-contract orders to fuel their growth and development. The Omaha Digital Marketplace is an economic engine that will lift the entire community. The broad economic benefits include the following: -Growth opportunities for businesses -High-paying jobs -Incremental wealth for business owners -Better circulation of dollars in the local economy.
Community sustainability is based on economic activity to support the people who live in the community. The Omaha Digital Marketplace will drive incremental economic activity in Omaha, focusing on North Omaha and South Omaha. This activity will provide growth opportunities for local businesses, create high-paying jobs, generate wealth for business owners, and better circulate funds in the local economy. These results of the Omaha Digital Marketplace fuel improvement of the overall quality of life for Omaha residents, especially those in North Omaha and South Omaha.
VIT’s eLink platform will power the Omaha Digital Marketplace. The eLink system is highly sophisticated and is a unique way to drive economic value to historically underutilized small and emerging businesses by positioning them to sell to large companies, government entities, and institutions. By implementing the Omaha Digital Marketplace, Omaha will be an early adopter of the eLink technology to generate economic activity in historically underserved areas. Some evidence of VIT’s history of innovation is listed below: -eLink won a Global Innovation Award from Red Hat (now owned by IBM) in 2016 for the creation of the innovative eLink concept. -eLink has been awarded a patent from the US Patent and Trademark Office (Patent Number 10,769,688, granted on September 8, 2020). Our patent sites nine unique features and technical processes. -We have created the best practices for e-commerce between small business sellers and large buyers for over two decades. Combined, VIT’s management team has hundreds of years of experience in operating business-to-business companies. VIT’s former parent company (American Product Distributors, Inc.) was one of the largest African-American-owned companies in the United States. We were one of the first small emerging businesses to develop e-commerce technology (circa 2000) and one of the most successful at using this technological expertise to generate revenue with large organizations.
VIT will measure the following outcomes: -Sales by local companies through the Omaha Digital Marketplace -Sales by zip code through the Omaha Digital Marketplace -Number of participating buyers -Number of participating sellers -Number of jobs created by VIT -Payments to local contractors by VIT
The eLink platform captures approximately 125 points of data on every order. The eLink system’s database will be the source of information that will be reported on sales/transactions between buyers and small emerging sellers. VIT will be the source of information for the number of jobs created and the payments made to local contractors.
As the Omaha Digital Marketplace matures, there is an opportunity to expand beyond Omaha. We anticipate this project will make help facilitate new partnerships and opportunities.
Yes
The Empowerment Network, Omaha Chamber of Commerce, National Minority Supplier Development Council (Great Plains), National Black Chamber of Commerce, United States Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, Women’s Business Enterprise National Council
No
The Omaha Digital Marketplace will not displace existing businesses or residents. It will enhance opportunities for existing businesses and residents.
Within one or more QCTs
The site for the Omaha Digital Marketplace office has not yet been determined.
No
No
No
No
No
No
The funds from this grant will be used to cover the following costs: Local Jobs – Operational support for small and emerging vendors in the local area, with a specific focus on North Omaha and South Omaha. Local Operating Expenses – Marketing, legal, accounting, rent, materials, and other general and administrative expenses Allocated Technical Costs – The cost to run the Omaha Digital Marketplace, including coding and costs, research and development, system administration, integrating with large buyer systems, platform hosting fees, and other technical costs allocated to the Omaha Digital Marketplace Business Development Costs – Sales, client relations, public relations, travel, partnership development, market research, and new market development
Yes
After the initial investment of this grant, VIT will begin to perform the following operations: Customize the view and operating rules of the Omaha Digital Marketplace for each buying organization Recruit buyers to subscribe to the Omaha Digital Marketplace Hire local employees to recruit, train, advise, and operationally support local small and emerging business sellers on e-commerce, especially those in North Omaha and South Omaha Train and manage the local operational support employees
VIT anticipates generating revenue from the operation of the Omaha Digital Marketplace that will allow this project to be financially sustainable. As outlined in the pro forma financial analysis, these are the funding sources other than this grant: Transaction Fees – VIT will charge transaction fees of 4% of sales generated through the Omaha Digital Marketplace, Vendor Catalog Fees - $500/year for small businesses to participate in the Omaha Digital Marketplace as sellers, Buyer Subscription Fees – Buyers will pay $25,000 per year to subscribe to the Omaha Digital Marketplace to gain access to the small emerging businesses, have the platform integrated with their procurement systems, and have customized business rules (e.g., automated order approval, blocked categories, product search boosting, etc.).
VIT has already begun discussions with large local businesses regarding their willingness to buy from small emerging businesses through the Omaha Digital Marketplace. This concept has been well received by the organizations that we have approached to date.
This proposal cannot continue without the grant funding that is requested, and it is needed to cover the startup costs of the Omaha Digital Marketplace. After those costs are covered, the Omaha Digital Marketplace can operate fiscally sustainably.
This proposal can reach other regions that are in proximity to Omaha. The project cannot be completed in smaller components, and the proposed scale is the minimum viable scale for this project.
VIT has invested over $7 million in the development of the eLink platform, which will power the Omaha Digital Marketplace. VIT has also invested approximately $750,000 in research and development and business development for the Omaha Digital Marketplace.
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