Big Week for Small Businesses

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Last week, from Feb. 10 to Feb. 17, was National Entrepreneurship Week, celebrating small businesses across the country. Several Molokai small businesses made the trip to Maui to highlight Molokai’s creative entrepreneurial spirit.
Maui County partnered with organizations across Maui, Lanai and Molokai including MEO, Maui Business Brainstormers and the Molokai-based organization Ho’aka Mana to celebrate National Entrepreneurship Week.

Kanoe Davis, executive director of Ho’aka Mana and CEO of her own small business PoMahina Designs, explained that “having a small business on an island where our resources are very limited, we found other ways to grow.”

Davis’ PoMahina Designs is sold internationally. “To think that a small place like Molo-mkai has an opportunity to leave the shores, to go to the continent, and then go to all
the different countries…it just doesn’t seem real, doesn’t seem fathomable in regards to where we are in Hawaii,” said Davis at the Feb. 12 event at the King Kamehameha Golf Club in Wailuku.

Some of the other Molokai small businesses in attendance were fellows from Ho’aka Mana’s Pulauhala small business intelligence cohort program, as well as other Molokai businesses like Molokai Sea Farms and The Molokai Dispatch.

Pulauhala has been part of a small business boom on Molokai in the lascouple of years. Just last year, Molokai brought in over 40 applications for new businesses, according to Davis.
“That’s a lot for our island,” said Davis. “It tells us how important it is to uplift each other, how important it is to
connect with everybody in the county.”

Former Pulauhala participants Mike and Nani Kahinu with Na’ike, Arianna Patterson with Arianna Photography and Solana Adachi of Pala’ela’e Collective, had a chance to speak at the event, emphasizing unique challenges and joys of running a Molokai small business.