We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Amy Yassinger. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Amy below.
Alright, Amy thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Naming anything – including a business – is so hard. Right? What’s the story behind how you came up with the name of your brand?
In 2008 I had moved back home to Chicago after graduate school and needed to work so I could start paying back my student loans. I was working 5 different jobs (restaurant, retail, singing lessons, small gigs here and there, and selling chicken sausage in a grocery store). While performing with a couple different bands in town my family encouraged me to start my own band. I got a few gigs at wine bars and restaurants and we needed a name. My friend at the time jokingly said “How about Amy and the Yazz Men”? He was joking but I thought he was serious. I started using Amy and the Yazz Men as my small little band and was eventually hired to play a few weddings. At this point in 2010 I was required to start an LLC so my father and I came up with Yazz Jazz at the dinner table. Yazz Jazz became Yazz Jazz Entertainment in 2011, Yazz Jazz Music & Productions in 2018 and then Yazz Events in 2022. I finally had to drop the word “Jazz” from our name because over the years it became apparent that we were losing out on events because clients assumed we were just a Jazz band. We were not. We had party bands, DJs, musicians, lighting, A/V and more. That’s where Yazz Events became the umbrella for the company and it has helped shed a lot of the Jazz “scariness”.
Amy, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
I sort of shared that in the last question about how Yazz Events came to be. For us I have heard over the years that we are very flexible and easy to work with. We allow clients to customize their song selections and musical experiences for their events and are very accommodating. In the past 14 years we have helped clients navigate the planning of their entertainment while being sensitive to family dynamics, sexual orientation and other things people can be extra conscious of when choosing their vendors for their events. For example, if a client has parents who are divorced and there is some family drama associated with it, we work to find ways to make them worry less about the possibility of problems related to family drama. Yazz Events is a woman-owned business and I’m proud of my team being patient, fun and innovative. Our turnover rate is practically zero (a few people moved out of state) and that’s something we are really happy about as well.
We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.
My friends and family would love for me to share this story but it’s so unbelievable that I don’t even know where to start. March of 2020 was a terrifying time as the pandemic started to unfold and we were all glued to the TV for information on a day-to-day basis. As a small business owner it was extra traumatic for me. Before March of 2020 I had been running my business for a decade, providing entertainment for weddings, social gatherings, galas, fundraisers and more. In addition to running my entertainment company and performing in public I was also a private singing teacher at a high school. I would teach mostly teenagers how to sing one-on-one during the school day and had done that for over a decade. When the shutdown started the weekend of March 14, 2020, my teaching dried up right away and my business was stopped dead in its tracks. We remained hopeful that it would only last a couple of months and weddings would pop right up again in June of 2020 but sadly that was not the case and we suffered over 60 cancellations. My livelihood stopped. People like me were offered 3 options at the time: file for unemployment, apply for an EIDL (emergency impact disaster loan to be paid back over 30 years at 3.75%) or get a forgivable PPP (paycheck protection program) loan. I didn’t apply for unemployment, was offered an EIDL loan (that I didn’t take out) but also started to apply for the PPP loan. On April 3, 2020 I started my application for the PPP loan with my lender Bank of America but didn’t finish it because the application was very hard to navigate and I was overwhelmed with fear and emotion. I got a phone call from a very eager mortgage banker on April 14, 2020 with the same name as me (you don’t forget the name of the woman who pushed you into the most insane battle of your life). She told me she was hired to help small businesses get PPP loans. I told her I wasn’t really sure how to complete the application and she walked me through it and told me not to worry because if any issues arose Bank of America underwriters would adjust the amount given to my business and that everything would be fine. I sent in my application and 2019 tax return with her guidance and on April 27th was asked to fill out an addendum that said I was “in business February 15, 2020 and had employees that received a W2 or 1099 contractors”. I sent in the addendum through a portal called Intralinks and on May 1, 2020, my business was given a PPP loan in the amount of $38,730. In order for this loan to be forgiven one was supposed to use it on forgivable expenses such as payroll, business operating expenses, etc. I didn’t touch the PPP loan for over 6 weeks mainly because I was not sure about the inner workings of it, I wasn’t an accountant or an attorney and everything I was reading was constantly changing. At this point I also got a job as a cashier at a car dealership and was driving for DoorDash to make ends meet. I set up payroll through Quickbooks and started to disperse the money to my team to compensate them for events that had cancelled. This kept them from applying for unemployment (which was the spirit of the PPP at the time). The funds were used up as the ever-changing guidelines required a small business owner to do over a 24-week period. At this time I was reaching out to Bank of America to ask about applying for forgiveness and they told me to be patient. Fast forward to March 17, 2021 (almost 11 months after receiving the PPP loan), I got a call from Marie at Bank of America telling me I could apply for forgiveness in the amount of $2,400. I thought she was joking but quickly learned she was not. There was no recourse at the time and shock and panic started to settle in. Who could you call to complain to? How could this be happening to me? Live events hadn’t even started back up yet and I was still working as a doordash driver and cashier at a car dealership. How was I going to pay back $36,000 over two years? I contacted my congressman via the website and local news stations via social media. CBS Chicago aired my story but sort of spun it in a way to make it look like I was facing imminent disaster versus the way I was treated by BofA. When I reached out for more help CBS chose to ignore me. It was clear no one wanted to showcase BofA in a bad way since they are a huge advertiser for the networks. My congressman’s office got in touch with me once they saw my news story and acted like they wanted to help but it was clear they didn’t really know how. Our congressional leaders wrote the CARES ACT yet were suddenly helpless when it came to helping small business owners like me. I also felt like I was the only person in this situation. Over the next couple of months I was looking for other victims like me on BofA social media posts and by checking out Youtube. I found a couple other BofA victims but no one really knew what to do. By May of 2021 I had hired an attorney to try and help me after being rejected by 13 other lawyers who claimed “conflict of interest”. My lawyer cost thousands of dollars but he tried to help get BofA to resolve my issue. He explained that if we went to arbitration it would cost way more than the $36,000 I was requesting and if we went to sue the bank it would cost over $250k. Big banks rely on this knowledge so they know you won’t succeed. The summer of 2021 social events were bouncing back and at a time I should have been joyful and happy I was in a complete depression. I couldn’t get out of bed most days and thought I’d be better off dead because I wouldn’t be able to pay back that money. In August of 2021, Forbes Magazine shared Ember’s story. She is the owner of a tattoo parlor in North Caroline who was on the hook for double the amount of my PPP loan. Once Ember and I connected, we ended up finding small business owners all across the country in the same boat. I felt that I was no longer alone. This group met weekly on Zoom to discuss options. We shared our stories on any news outlets who would listen to us. Once we were on NPR, another lawyer reached out and promised to help us. Turns out she wanted to infiltrate our group to find a couple of lead plaintiffs for a class action lawsuit. She plucked two women out of our group who each had PPP loans under $5,000. They would be easy to go after a big settlement because the lawyers would make millions and those two ladies would come back whole, versus some of the victims who owed $100k. In December of 2021 I reluctantly applied for forgiveness via BoA’s portal after daily threats from the bank via mail, email and calls since March. Any time I made a payment of $2000 they took a 35% finance charge (which they later denied doing). In the summer of 2022 I found a video of the Small Business Committee hearing for the House of Representatives and finally felt seen. Representative Chrissy Houlahan out of Pennsylvania brought up the fact that the smallest of small businesses (micro businesses) were not being fully forgiven for loans under $100k and that it was hurting people. Over time we learned that several members of congress received PPP loans and had them fully forgiven. Millionaires (such as the owner of the car dealership I worked for) got PPP loans and got them forgiven. I made contact with the Center for Responsible Lending and was connected Chrissy Houlahan’s office. Her staffer named Harrison met with me and Heather in August of 2022. Who is Heather? She is the owner of a dance studio in Illinois who was being forced to pay back $9,000 and could not afford it. Her and I met up in Washington DC and had a great chat with Chrissy Houlahan’s office. They advised us to start knocking on doors in the Longsworth and Cannon buildings. Heather and I knocked on hundreds of doors that day, interrupting a lot of staffers as they were eating lunch and FaceTiming their friends and families. They were often asking us “Who are you with?” or “Who sent you?” We simply replied, “We are 2 small business owners in Illinois struggling to get PPP loan forgiveness and were hoping you would sign the Dear Colleague letter that Representative Houlahan sent out”. Word started to spread about these two women from Illinois randomly knocking on doors and an advocacy group called ABIC (America Business Immigration Coalition) reached out to us and helped arrange for several of us to fly back to DC a second time to meet with more congresspeople and senators. We even had a press conference. These trips to DC gave us some hope but instantly turned to despair when we realized that both sides of the aisle were unwilling to fix the PPP loan forgiveness issue. The main issue was that the PPP was established under President Trump so the Republicans were quick to blame Democrats for allowing money to flow out so quickly. And on the other side, Democrats blamed Republicans for being mean and unwilling to help small businesses now that President Biden was in office. Over time we discovered that BofA helped draft legislation regarding PPP loans and that is why congress was bouncing us back to the SBA and the SBA bounced us to the Bank and the Bank bounced us to the SBA. 2021 and 2022 were two years of being ping pong balls. Senator Durbin was able to get half of my loan forgiven in December of 2022. He was also able to get me a copy of my Promissory Note because BofA up until that point had refused to do so. The Intralinks portal they established in 2020 for us to upload documents to had also vanished. I filed a hearing with the SBA in the summer of 2023 and the judge sided with me. She confirmed that the bank could not change the rules in the middle of the game. To this day I still have no idea where my loan stands but I’m not giving BofA anymore money. They have thousands of dollars that should have been fully forgiven and I’d like it back but I am at peace since I haven’t been harassed by them since June of 2023.
How am I resilient? Well the world didn’t stop while I fought the biggest bank. We continued to book events and serviced clients from 2021 till today. We are busier than ever and doing our best to stay afloat. We love making people happy and will continue to try and do so. As horrible as this has been, I am grateful to know hundreds of incredible small business owners from across the country. It also helped me streamline the way I run my business regarding payroll and accounting as well. And I’m not afraid to stand up for those who can’t speak up for themselves. The government and big banks were compliant in the destruction of small businesses and it’s a very unfortunate fact.
What’s worked well for you in terms of a source for new clients?
We truly rely on word of mouth referrals.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.yazzevents.com
- Instagram: www.instagram.com/yazzevents
- Facebook: www.facebook.com/yazzeventsmusic
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXdBbZwzUw_Sk2STyjjvKz4D-Cy2h8Y31
Image Credits
Lacour Images have the watermark Sonce Landa Photography for the big group photo Ivory and Lace Photography for the pretty bride/groom twirling dress picture