Health Company Maintains Roots in the Community With Bridge Loan

Ginger Fitness and Rehabilitation of Hillsborough County

Hoang Le opened Ginger Fitness and Rehabilitation more than 15 years ago. Le has more than 25 years of experience as a physical therapist. This experience has helped her expand her business to two locations. Specialties range from driving evaluation and practice to occupational and physical therapy and personal training.

Even with all the successes thus far, Hurricane Irma put a kink in progress in September 2017. That’s when Le decided to seek assistance in the form of a State of Florida Emergency Bridge Loan. To do this, she sought the assistance of the Florida SBDC at University of South Florida.

When asked about her experience with the storm and the assistance received, Le recalled:

What type of damage occurred?
We have four clinics and they are all in the Tampa Bay area. With Irma, we had to shut down all of our appointments. We couldn’t really schedule home visits either. Appointments were being canceled one to two weeks before, during cleanup and after. Then we had to worry about paying our staff.

How will the Bridge Loan help?
We ran behind on some of our payments and really just helps to catch up. We have credit cards that are high interest rates, for example, and we just want to catch up and not be behind on anything.

How was the Florida SBDC at USF helpful during this process?
It’s been great. I really enjoy the classes. When I first started the business, I took courses just to learn how to start the business. Then I was on my own for a long time and my business started growing so we need to be more professional. So we’re coming back to you guys and we just want to do everything very professionally and we can’t just be puttering on our own. We were trying to pull everything together. We had a lot of information to pull together and last-minute decisions had to be made and Carol was very helpful. We were really appreciative of all that.