Economic engine: utah is on track for record SBA lending.

• Author: Dobner, Jennifer
• Position: Business Trends

When Cecilia Mitchell drives through the streets of Salt Lake City, she sees a little bit of herself in many of the storefront windows. After some 30 years of working in the commercial lending arena of the banking industry, Mitchell, a senior vice president for Zions Bank, has helped more than a few of Utah's small businesses get off the ground--in both good times and bad.

"When I look around I say, 'oh, I helped that person over there and this person over here:" says Mitchell. "There's a sense of pride ... and we're not just helping that one business owner, we're also helping their employees. It is about providing availability to capital and other financial resources, but it's really also about community."

Helping small businesses--those with fewer than 500 workers--has had its share of challenges after the game-changing reality of 2008's Great Recession. The nation was gutted of some 8.4 million jobs, and overall business investment contracted, if not collapsed. Even in Utah, where the business climate has long been considered resilient and robust, the downturn's effects were "gut-wrenching," says Natalie Gochnour, an associate dean of the University of Utah's David Eccles School of Business.

"We lost over 100,000 jobs peak to trough, but we've recovered more quickly." says Gochnour. "We've recovered all of the losses and are growing at a rapid pace."

Despite that recovery, however, for small business owners and lenders, growth in the post-recession era looks and feels a bit different than in years past.

Lending Climate Changes

Shifts in the commercial lending climate have changed how both borrowers and lenders behave, says Steve Price, deputy director of the Utah office of the U.S. Small Businesses Administration, whose government-backed loan programs have been helping small businesses, at no cost to taxpayers, since 1953.

Among the changes to the lending landscape: Business owners are more reluctant to take on new debt, while banks and credit unions have been squeezed by regulators concerned about a repeat of the bubble burst that undercut the economy.

That's served to curtail some lending and reduced the number of SBA-backed loans guaranteed in each of the past six years, Price says. What it hasn't done, however, is forced a consistent drop in overall lending totals.

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In fact, Utah lending numbers have dropped only once in the past six years, according to SBA data. That was in 2010, when SBA secured some 1,678...