Recommendation to receive and file a report on the development and launch of BizPort, the City’s new online application to reduce the cost, confusion, and time to start and grow a business in the City of Long Beach.  (Citywide)
Thank you. Let's have item number 14. Please report from City Manager Recommendation to receive and file a report on the development and launch of Biz Port, the city's new online application to reduce the cost, confusion and time to start and grow a business in Long Beach Citywide. Thank you, Mr. West. Vice mayor. Council members were very, very happy to have a quick report on our new technological innovation. Our online ombudsman for starting a new business. Our technology. Innovation. Itim director John Keisler is going to walk us through this with the help of his team. John. Good evening, Mayor and City Council. I'm here with Heidi Wares mother, project manager for Biz Port and we have a short presentation to give you some visuals of what this new tool can do and why it's valuable to the city of Long Beach and our entrepreneurs. And so we usually start with the innovation delivery approach with a user and the user's journey. And the process for an entrepreneur can be very, very difficult and challenging to find the resources that they need to open their doors. And so what this port tries to do, it's focused on entrepreneurs that we interviewed here in the city of Long Beach. We mapped their journey and we developed the tool around their experience so that it can help them get through the process a lot faster. Currently in the city of Long Beach, and this data is as recent as yesterday, it takes approximately 27 days median for all business license types. From the time that an entrepreneur will register for a business license to the day that it gets approved. And that could involve many, many different agencies. That could be the city agencies, you know, fired planning, building financial management, but also could be county, state and even federal agencies that. That have to participate. In that process. So what we want. To do is we want to reduce confusion, reduce cost, make our entrepreneurs more competitive and improve access to these resources. 24 seven And as I mentioned before, the process is designed around the user's journey. So even if it involves 12 different agencies, we want to give them the tools and the resources they need when they need them and designed around the process that they'll experience. So this is what it looks like. This port is built mobile first by our development group Code for America, a civic tech nonprofit from the Bay Area. As you remember, the council approved the Code for America Fellowship in August of 2015. And throughout this process, our Code for America developers arrived in February. And believe it or not, we were ready to launch by October 5th. That's one of the fastest processes technology implementations built from scratch that I've ever experienced. It's built in open source architecture, which means that it's highly flexible and entrepreneurs will be able to build on this code. In fact, it's reported that eight other cities in a county have already approached Code for America to access this open source code and make it a part of. Their. Organization. Strategy to help entrepreneurs. This port also brings a number of new solutions with regard to communication of information, including new what we call Internet clips or I clips that come in multiple languages. They present information about what could be complex rules and regulations in very simple and easy to understand format. They use icons that are familiar and universal, and they utilize subtitles in multiple languages so that people who may not use the volume or may need information in different languages can access that information quickly and easily. And this port is really built around three important stages of planning a business, launching a business and growing a business. Most of the business portals that are out there right now in the country really focus on what we would call the launch process. How do you register your business in the regulatory process of that city or county? We really have a philosophy that entrepreneurs will be able to get faster to approval, open those doors, faster saving time and money if they spend a little bit more time on the planning process. And so there's resources in that first column about business planning, financial planning and accessing services that are outside City Hall. So the Small Business Development Center, small business consultants, even mentors from regional agencies like Score. By the time you get to the launch process, we hope that our entrepreneurs will be more competitive and move faster through the regulatory process of licensing, permitting and perhaps applying for special permits in special uses, and then on the growth process once they've opened their doors. What kind of resources. Do they have for. Workforce hiring, obtaining funding to expand their business and developing their marketing plans so that they can increase the amount of customers? Something else that's very, very cool about this port is the fact that we've now established my profile and we call this the digital wallet. Many entrepreneurs explain to us and even city staff that sometimes business license numbers, you know, permits the state sellers I.D. This information can oftentimes get lost over the course of a entrepreneur's process. So this is the first time that the city is offering a digital wallet where they can keep this information and they can walk into any city department, bring this up on their phone. We have almost a hundred users already. We launched October 5th and already have 100, almost 100 profiles in the system today. You can see some of the information that you might keep. It can get confusing. And instead of having to keep lots of pieces of paper, you can start to load this information into your digital wallet. The other thing that's really unique about this point is the help chat function. All of our our information that's that's trans transmitted ideas to improve the site. Maybe questions about the licensing or permitting process can be communicated by clicking on that little bubble, the chat bubble in the bottom right corner. You're welcome to log on to your phone right now and chat with our developers. Lisa and Mark from Code for America are sitting right here in the audience and likely Lisa will respond to you if you send her an idea to improve the application. What else is unique here is that we receive hundreds of calls and questions across the city each day about different issues related to licensing and permitting. But if you chat a question about business licensing, for instance, our Code for America team has has written rules that will automatically send that question to the business license staff member who's responsible for that item. So we've found a more efficient way to refer and triage questions and send them to the people so that there's no wrong door. Another set of tools that we were told as we explored the process of starting a business was about site selection and about finding a building or a space. There's a really neat tool that. The Council. Of Governments in the Gateway area had built called Zoom Prospector. And so we've integrated applications like this into this port so that you now can find what's called a ring study. So if you see that that little ring up there, this was a search I did this afternoon looking for a building that was of a certain square footage for a certain purpose or type. And then I dropped a ring around it and said, what is consumer spending look like across different categories of goods and services? These tools, oftentimes to do a market analysis, we were told, can cost 15 to $30000. Now, an entrepreneur has these these resources at their fingertips, and they can use this for their business and financial planning. Something else that is extremely unique about this process, actually. You see, I mentioned there were 100, approximately 100 users that had already established a profile. It was 99 as of this afternoon because Heidi downloaded this this screenshot for us. But something that is really unique about the process for ongoing development and evolving this tool is what we call our shared dashboard in our analytics club. This is a group of approximately 25 people from cross-sectoral organizations. So our business improvement districts are Long Beach City College, our Small Business Development Center, as well as city staff from multiple departments meet on a monthly basis to review the behavior and usage of this sport. We use these numbers to drive strategy not only to develop new aspects of the system, but also to test where our users are coming from. Right now, a thousand of our 2500 sessions in the last 30 days have come from the business licensing websites. So we know that a lot of people come to us looking for information about their business license. We also know what kind of devices they're using and how they're accessing this information. That big spike in usage, of course, was October 5th when this report was announced and unveiled. We saw the highest usage in one single day, and we've seen usage reach the 2500 sessions mark, which is an incredible statistic when you consider that it's just recently been unveiled to the public. And finally, as we finish this up, ongoing development is going to be driven. Through an. Online survey. So we're able to capture in real time information about how we're doing rating the services rating against those those challenges that we mentioned at the beginning of this presentation cost, confusion, competitiveness. How are we doing and how can we improve? And then finally we're trying something new in that we have put our marketing and promotion tools out on an open source platform called GitHub, and that code is available to other organizations, partners that will help to embed that code on these digital banners in their websites and really try to institutionalize this point throughout the community so that the entire ecosystem, including all of our business support services, our business improvement districts, our local universities and colleges, can embed this point in their practicing curriculum. So with that, I'll finish my report and be happy to answer any questions about this part. Thank you. And just I just have a couple comments. I would say I think this is great, fantastic. And I'm really interested in seeing what the next step is. If someone, you know is savvy enough to get an app in or go through a website to go through this process, then they probably could navigate City Hall on their own. But for those who aren't savvy aren't that savvy, I think this could be a good tool if it sort of helped keep that, hold them accountable to sort of the next steps and things like when they need to get, you know, signatures for a facade of a sign program, they just want to get their sign up. You know, another thing is it would be good if we looked into DocuSign. You know, we're still collecting wet signatures to get a rebate on like facade project or a web signatures from property owners. And sometimes you have more more than one property owner, and it isn't worth it for a $2,000 rebate to go to people across the country. And it would be good if we somehow streamlined it to have DocuSign in there to where they can. The next step, after you get your business open, get your grants, get your rebates and all that stuff process. So, so John, that's just a recommendation. I'd love to see that. And that's what I've heard from a lot of the small businesses, you know, to get them to take time to download the app and go through it or come down to City Hall is a lot. When you get them there, you want to if you get them to download that, you want them to be able to do everything they can while you have them. That's my comments. Councilman Andrew's Councilwoman Price. Thank you. This is fantastic. So congratulations to everyone on your team and the the folks who have helped us with from Code for America. So this is fantastic. Thank you. This is up until this point, our district office has had a human biz part. Her name is Lisa West and she's been helping businesses through this process. So this is going to be much more efficient and we're already starting to talk about it at our community meetings. So thank you. I do want to say, while the code for America people are are here that, you know, about two or three years ago I saw the TED talk on Adopt a Hydrant and I would love to see some quality of life apps be developed for the city of Long Beach through Code for America. I've talked about it a lot. I've talked about it with John. I've talked to I know my former chief of staff, Julie Maliki, spoke with some of the Code for America folks in San Francisco. And I recently talked with our the chair of our innovation commission. I think there are a lot of opportunities for us to incorporate technology into our quality of life issues. We don't have the need for an adopt a hydrant here because our hydrants don't get snowed in in California. But we do have medians and trees and homeless issues and bike theft issues and bike tracking issues. There's a lot of opportunities for us to incorporate innovation into quality of life issues. So community watch groups, anything like that. So I'm so excited for Biz Port not to take away from how exciting this port is, but I would love for our residents to have more of a finger on the pulse of what's happening in the city around them and have a sense of empowerment and engagement, much like our business owners do. But this is this is a fantastic, tremendous new addition. And Heidi, congrats for taking the lead on this. So thank you very much for the presentation. It was excellent. Thank you, Councilwoman Gonzalez. Yes, thank you. This is wonderful. I actually sent a little message to Lisa while I was here thanking her. So I have a couple questions are just actually just a couple of thoughts I had. This is fantastic. As my colleagues have stated, I love all this because I think that this does give businesses and entrepreneurs that are budding another opportunity to do things through tech, which is really great. What type of I know we have analytics on the back end, so I mean, are we looking maybe at a year out or what where are we looking at as kind of our deadline to see how this is functioning well or not? Councilmember Gonzales. So so the cool thing about the way that this architecture is built is that it's entirely iterative. So it'll continue to be shaped by the usage and behavior of the users and the feedback that we get. It's also a collaborative project, meaning that our business support agencies who really drive the good work to attract and retain and grow our businesses out in the community, we're able to use this tool as a shared platform to leverage and better empower them with the tools that they might need to really expand that effort and grow business . And so so something I think in terms of analytics and what we call business analytics is that there will be a round of initiatives coming that relate to leveraging or making open more city information through what's called our Argo hub. And a few weeks ago, really the council considered an item and approved the contract with Ezri to expand the GEO Hub and to leverage city owned data and make that available to the public to start developing even more applications that can help for them to self-serve and solve problems. And so we really think that in terms of analytics, that the launch of the Geo Hub and the new Geo apps and we just recently featured that at the Civic Innovation Summit last Thursday and then we rolled it out in terms of the applications at at Cal State Long Beach on Saturday with our first Geo Apps challenge . We believe that that is going to be a huge driver of opening up that data and providing more analytics about how people are using this portal to ultimately expand the number of business licenses in the city. Great. That's wonderful. And one more thought that I'll add. I think that's fantastic. I'm wondering if there's a way and I think I've talked about it with you before, to identify these entrepreneurs or existing businesses that currently have patents, because I think that that's what makes the city very inventive and unique, is learning how many patents they have in the city. And so that would just be really interesting. Maybe if there's a way to embed that in the software, I think that'd be great. You know, maybe clicking on something. I have a patent and maybe a short snippet. I think LinkedIn is starting to do that as well. Like, do you have a patent? And that information may be very valuable to us. Thank you and great work. Thank you. Councilmember Pearce. Yes. I just wanted to thank the team for all their work. I know that you guys have been plugging along on this and looks really great. I also want to thank Code for America for all of your work. I know you guys are also working with some other groups on a couple of other things that we're working on in the city. So really excited about that is, I think is the same question that the vice mayor had around. What's next? Are there ways on here for us to if they're expanding their hours to collect their signatures on here to do things that will allow us to kind of fast track that growth part in a new, exciting way. So thank you. Thank you, Councilman Austin. Well, I just want to salute the I-Team, I think. Job well done. This is exactly what you guys were put in place to do, is be innovative, be creative and create tools to help us grow business and make us more business friendly. I think this app, I think it serves as a good baseline to start from. I'm hearing comments that they'd like to see more, but darn well to to to start with. Very well. Thank you. I guess you're a victim of your own success. You do a good thing. People want to see more. But thank you. Thank you. Let's give another round of applause to the Innovation Team and Code for America for doing what they what they did. Is there any public comment on this item? Seeing none. Members, please cast your vote. Councilmember Soprano motion carries.