Universal Processing - Six Po Hot Pot Success Story

When Lily Zhao came to the U.S to pur­sue her Mas­ter degree, she nev­er thought that one day, she would become a mil­len­ni­al minor­i­ty women busi­ness own­er. Espe­cial­ly one of the small busi­ness own­ers that had to fight to sur­vive the Covid-19 pan­dem­ic. In 2019, Lily opened a very authen­tic hot pot restau­rant in Boston called Six Po Hot Pot, and soon it became the most pop­u­lar one with a two hour aver­age wait­ing time for a table. But every­thing sud­den­ly changed when Covid hit town. She was faced with zero walk-in cus­tomers while her busi­ness relied on 95% rev­enue from dine-in. This meant that they could not even afford rent and pay­roll any­more. When the gov­ern­ment announced the grants and loans, Lily saw a light of hope. But she nev­er applied for any­thing from the gov­ern­ment before, and she had no con­fi­dence at all that she could receive finan­cial sup­port from the gov­ern­ment. She also doubt­ed her abil­i­ty to iden­ti­fy the real grant oppor­tu­ni­ties that were open to her. As Lily’s account man­ag­er, Leila Li trav­eled three times dur­ing the pan­dem­ic from NYC to Boston to help Six Po Hot Pot set up the POS sys­tem and new pay­ment gate­way. By that time she learned of Lily’s sit­u­a­tion and start­ed to work with Lily to sup­port her in the grant process. Leila told her, ​“Let’s apply for all no mat­ter what, any­thing could be a help.” So they pre­pared all the required doc­u­ments togeth­er, researched all avail­able pro­grams and assist­ed Lily to apply for three qual­i­fied pro­grams: PPP, RRF, and Door­dash grant. After a few months wait­ing, Lily final­ly received her first PPP fund in Jan­u­ary 2021, the Door­dash grant in April 2021, and the RRF in May 2021. Lily’s busi­ness sur­vived and thrived with the finan­cial sup­port from gov­ern­ment and tech­ni­cal sup­port from Uni­ver­sal Pro­cess­ing. In fact, the cur­rent busi­ness month­ly vol­ume has increased over 400% com­pared to March 2020.