Lorena Bravo

About Lorena Bravo

I started my first business before I knew what an SBDC was. Now I work at one.As a bilingual business consultant at the PA Small Business Development Center at Kutztown University, I sit across the table from entrepreneurs in South Central PA who are starting, stabilizing, and scaling small businesses — often on tighter margins, with less institutional runway, than the economic development brochures ever acknowledge. I spend a growing part of my time understanding why Spanish-preferring entrepreneurs remain under-connected to publicly funded technical assistance, and what has to change — on our side, not theirs — so they can see us, find us, and trust us.My consulting is practical: market research, business planning, financial projections, capital readiness, and connecting clients to the right legal, tax, lending, and workforce resources. The underlying approach is coaching. I want clients to reflect, to discern, and to leave a meeting able to make decisions they can defend to themselves later — not because I handed them an answer, but because they arrived at one.I am also an Ed.D. candidate in Transformational Teaching and Learning at Kutztown, where my dissertation examines how public entrepreneurship support systems — their design, their metrics, their assumptions about who is ‘ready’ — shape the experience of Spanish-preferring entrepreneurs in the United States. That research is not separate from my consulting; it is what keeps my consulting honest. It is also the reason I am careful about the difference between access on paper and access in practice, and the reason I do not write the word ‘empower’ without meaning it.Before any of this, I was a small business owner myself. My company was named Best of the Valley. That experience undergirds everything I bring into a consultation — I know what it feels like to sign a lease, to hire and fire employees, to be the person responsible when something doesn’t go as planned.Outside of this work, I support Big Brothers Big Sisters of the Lehigh Valley, the Allentown Art Museum and The Literacy Center. Art, mentorship, and small business all belong to the same economy of human flourishing to me.I am a Colombian-born Latina working in a field I am committed to making better. I write here about what I see at the consulting table, what I’m learning in my doctoral work, and what happens when public systems meet the people they were built to serve — especially when those people were not in the room when the system was designed.

Experience

1. Bilingual Business Consultant

   Kutztown University Small Business Development Center

   Apr 2024 — Present · Kutztown, PA, US

   Advised 498 small business owners and aspiring entrepreneurs across South Central PA since April 2024 — 249 of them first-time clients to the SBDC — on business planning, market research, financial projections, and capital readiness, in both English and Spanish- Supported clients in accessing over $1.6 million in capital funding through strategic advising on loan readiness, financial projections, and lender preparation- Completed 116 market research projects for individual clients, providing the competitive and demographic data they needed to make informed decisions about location, pricing, and market entry- Contributed to the establishment of 26 new businesses through sustained consulting from concept through launch — including seven where I supported grand opening efforts- Lead bilingual client engagement with a particular focus on Spanish-preferring entrepreneurs — including intake design, translated resource development, and one-on-one consulting — to widen access to publicly funded technical assistance- Connect clients to the appropriate legal, tax, lending, and workforce partners in the South Central PA small-business ecosystem, so they can make informed decisions the SBDC itself cannot advise on.

Education

• Lehigh University

  Master of Arts - MA, Public Policy & Community Fellow

  2020 — 2021

• Kutztown University of Pennsylvania

  Bachelor's degree, Spanish Language and Literature

• Kutztown University of Pennsylvania

  Doctor of Education - EdD, Transformational Teaching and Learning