Grant opportunities are all too often funded late, and the rules fixed close to the deadline for grant submission. This puts small business at a disadvantage. Yes, you have a few weeks to get the grant written, but you also have a small business to run, and unlike Verizon, you don’t have $400 per hour lawyers and accountants to do the work for you.

So it makes sense to prepare for the grant writing process before the rules are fixed.

Accounting

You need to prepare because you will be asked for information about your business that you do not have readily at hand. As Charles Wu of CTI likes to say, “small businesses have a bookkeeping function but not an accounting function.”

Most small businesses keep track of cash flow but do not track accounting items such as the depreciation of plant and other assets. Small businesses have a cash flow statement but often lack a balance sheet.

Most grants will require information from a balance sheet. Therefore, before the rules of the grant are set, there’s a lot you can do. You can have your bookkeeper gather the data you’ll use to calculate costs. Answer some simple questions, such as how much did you spend on marketing last year, how much does customer support cost per customer, and how expensive is it to set up a new wireless tower.

Businesses start out in this process with good intentions, but the daily management work often takes over, and all too often the grant writing process is a scramble to the finish line that uses only half of the already too-limited time that the state or federal government has made available.

Growth metrics

In addition to accounting metrics, it’s a good idea to gather and examine other key business metrics. You may have an approximate idea of how fast your WISP is growing, but for the grant writing process, it’s great to have the actual statistics of how many customers you added and how many you lost for each month over the past 12 to 36 months.

If you’re planning to grow faster than you have in the past, plan that growth with your sales team. Describe how many people you’ll hire in order to achieve faster growth or to serve an area that’s outside your current coverage area.

Gather market research statistics on the area you’re targeting (your grant writer can certainly do this, but you may want the information for yourself). At the very least, look up the townships or counties on the census.gov site, using Quick Facts for counties and cities, and the more detailed but slower FactFinder for small towns.

If you’re a wireless ISP, you have a mapping function of some sort. Do as much of the mapping as you can for the area you intend to cover. The map is the core of your business plan. It lets the evaluator know exactly what you want to do, in a way that financials and even words cannot. Get the map started early.

When you’re thinking about an expansion area, start thinking about a realistic growth plan. If you have one tower climber on staff, or you use only one contractor, build a tower per quarter or less. This will allow all of your other business functions, such as sales and customer service, to keep up with growth. Many businesses like to say that all the growth will happen immediately, but that’s just not true, and a realistic plan is a persuasive plan.

Your plan is even more persuasive if you demonstrate that you know your equipment.

Equipment

You’ll need to have a network plan. Often, this is not too difficult, because the equipment you’re adding is the same equipment you’re already using. However, if the grant includes a network upgrade, start examining the equipment you want to upgrade to (today, WISPs would like to upgrade to WiMAX and in some cases to better backbones such as DragonWave or even fiber).

Any expertise that you can demonstrate will enhance the application.

Work out an approximate tower map, and start guessing at the equipment you’ll need on each tower. The plan can be written to allow flexibility — you’ll need to adjust to business results — but a plan will help a lot.

Conclusion

These are just some of the things you can do to prepare for grant writing project. Additional items depend on the specifics of your business and the opportunity you’re looking into.

Cross posted at WiNOG Grants Cooperative

The solution is obvious, build basic infrastructure (from roads to broadband to paying nurses’ salaries).

“We can’t say this enough,” writes David Isenberg.

An example is the OpenCape project, which I wrote about here. Planning for it began years ago. It involved local emergency services, educational instutions, and the local small business association.

ISPs should already be working these institutions (if they are reasonable as customers).

Here’s the list of what the stimulus defined as critical community institutions:

• Schools (K-12)

• Libraries

• Medical and Healthcare Providers

• Public Safety Entities

• Public Housing

• Institutions of Higher Education

• Community Support Organization

• Government Facilities

Serving any of these institutions can help an ISP obtain positive publicity and possibly also an anchor customer for the network. Each will have positives and negatives as a customer. There’s no need to serve everyone on this list, but as a member of your community, you’re likely to find at least one of them amenable and a useful partner.

Here’s a famous example in the WISP industry: Marlon Schafer’s police deployment.

First Step Internet won an award in round one (easygrants ID: 643). Here’s their about page. It’s a good example of how to be both businesslike and a good citizen as an ISP.

The goal of the stimulus (and, possibly, future FCC policy) was to make the ISP industry a local service provider. More than just a business, it too would become a critical community institution, an anchor for rural communities that are losing their working age population.

This is a possible future for the wireless ISPs. They could become local protected institutions with a mandate that exists for only as long as they serve and help their rural communities. It would be a local utility. It would be influenced by an idealization of the rural community that may never have existed in the past, but which could be a part of our connected future.

Here’s a list of whom Forbes expects to win.

My comments, based on what we know at this time, are here.

I wish some of the stimulus went towards repairing basic infrastructure.

The best applicants are proud of their executive summaries. Victoria Proffer of St. Louis, Mo.-based ShowMe Broadband said in a press release that she was pleased that the government decided to post her entire executive summary. You can read her company’s executive summary here. As you can see, it clearly describes the history of the company and the purpose of the stimulus application.

At WiNOG, we help you write the summary — and help prepare the numbers too.

In addition to the narrative, the government is asking for several numbers. Participants at the Denver, CO BTOP workshop (I attended via webcast) said that the new streamlined simulus application asks for numbers. In the first round, many applicants wove those numbers into their executive summaries but in round 2, those numbers will be in boxes on the form. So you’ll need to calculate the number of job-years created by your project and the number of anchor institutions passed. We can help you calculate those numbers, which will also be vital to your application.

Many who applied in round one have been rejected or will soon receive a rejection letter, but head of the NTIA Larry Strickland said, “Don’t fret over round one, there’s more money in round two. I know folks are getting what you’re calling a rejection letter, but we’re looking at it as an ‘opportunity to reapply’ letter.”

The government is under pressure from Congress to hand out the money faster. The departments involved, the commerce department and the USDA, have a one time chance to prove that they can handle the unprecedented levels of funding that the stimulus has provided. We believe that they can do this, and that the challenge of the stimlus funds gives those ISPs that have been in business in rural areas a significant advantage. You know where the need is and we can help you fill it.

By Alex Goldman

Cross posted to WiNOG

Satellite service grants will be accepted for specific areas (the map showing those areas has not yet been published).

Satellite service is designed for those areas where wireline and wireless won’t work, where either would cost over $10,000 per home connected.

Satellite service providers will be obliged to provide CPE for free and to provide service at a price at least 25 percent below prices that the service provider published on December 1, 2009.

The expected cost of service is at most $750 per home.

These may seem like tough conditions, but the RUS is in effect handing over specific areas to satellite providers — and there are not very many of them (although some allow ISPs to resell their service).

In round one, several satellite providers submitted bids covering most of the nation. I preferred those aimed at areas that presented particular challenges to wired and wireless internet providers.

The RUS has set aside up to $100 million for satellite projects. We’re waiting to see which areas have been set aside for satellite, but this looks like a very good opportunity for those service providers that know how to deploy satellite internet service.

Cross posted to WiNOG.

The definition of broadband is 768 / 200 Kbps but there is also a definition of high speed, which is 5 Mbps symmetrical. Any area without high speed service can be underserved, which opens up a large portion of the country to grants. “RUS has determined that rural areas without service at 5 Mbps (upstream and downstream combined) lack high speed broadband service sufficient to facilitate rural economic development as required by the Recovery Act,” the notice said.

Furthermore, the language that Boucher complained about, which said that underserved areas had to be a certain number of miles from an urban area, is also not present.

Instead, the RUS now defines a rural area as “any area, as confirmed by the latest decennial census of the Bureau of the Census, which is not located within: (1) a city, town, or incorporated area that has a population of greater than 20,000 inhabitants; or (2) an urbanized area contiguous and adjacent to a city or town that has a population of greater than 50,000 inhabitants. For purposes of the definition of rural area, an urbanized area means a densely populated territory as defined in the latest decennial census of the Bureau of the Census.”

Applicants will be relieved to hear that they can define their coverage area by something other than census blocks, such as township boundaries and counties. I think this is a great rule because many applicants were working with one or more counties in determining their coverage area.

Applicants will be relieved to hear that they only need one professional engineer (PE) certification even if their application covers multiple states (section V C 1 j of the preliminary notice).

Applicants can identify confidential information on their application. It will be redacted on the public website.

Applicants should note that applications will be weighted according to the unemployment rate of the state the application covers. Applications covering multiple states will use a weighted average of the unemployment rates.

Recent unemployment data can be found at the Bureau of Labor Statistics (but I do not know what data the RUS will use).

According to the data I found, the U.S. average is 10 percent. Michigan has the highest overall (14.7). California and Nevada have an unemployment rate of 12.3 percent (and Oregon has 11.1 percent unemployment). South Carolina is at 12.3 percent and Rhode Island is at 12.7 percent. Most of the other states are close to 10 percent, but the rural states have very low unemployment. Nebraska has the lowest (4.5 percent), and Vermot (5.0) and South Dakota (6.4) are also low.

Applications will also take into account the median household income of the area covered. This is very important, and median income varies widely between counties within a state.

Applications are accepted from February 16, 2010 through March 15, 2010.

Round two will have only one step (not two), which sounds great, but it means that the environmental portion of the application that was not due with the initial application in round one will be due at the deadline this time.

The two organizations (the NTIA of the Commerce Department and the RUS of the Department of Agriculture) are dividing up the tasks — RUS will handle last mile applications and NTIA will handle middle mile applications.

It is therefore no surprise that he took the task of ranking applications to heart and provided a clear, detailed letter (here in .pdf format from the Baller Herbst website) that ranked the various applications involving the state of Vermont.

He chose Vermont CTO Tom Evslin (blog here) to head the stimulus effort of the state of Vermont — a higher profile person than that heading the stimulus effort in many much larger states.

I was surprised, however, to see that the letter says that Fairpoint has done an excellent job of providing broadband to the state of Vermont. At a hearing recently, a Vermont firefighter opposed further sales of lines by Verizon when he said, “In Vermont we once had ‘Ma Bell’ provide our telephone service. Then we had ‘Baby Bell’ service. Sadly, with FairPoint’s acquisition of Verizon’s northern New England properties, we now only have ‘Tinker Bell’ service.”

(The state may soon have power problems too, if nuclear plants are spun off and allowed to go bankrupt.)

The state also claims that the proposals it favors only appear to overlap. I’m certain the federal government will examine that claim.

Proposals not recommended

I think it’s wonderful — and politically courageous — that the state chose to highlight a few proposals it does not recommend. I am particularly pleased that it does not recommend the satellite proposals from EchoStar and Hughes. I agree that they will do little for Vermont.

I agree that Aircell’s proposal for in-flight broadband, while interesting, does not belong in the stimulus.

Vermont expressed some doubts about MegaPath and I have heard similar doubts from others but do not have access to enough information to judge their proposal myself.

I think it’s great that the state criticized so many education proposals as being too expensive or poorly targeted.

Finally, on mapping, the state is justifiably proud of its own mapping project, and of the fact that its mapping project was one of the first to be funded by the federal government.