Business Services

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The Montana Secretary of State’s business portal – an inescapable journey for every business owner and organization founder in the state - is an antiquated nightmare of bureaucratic inefficiency. Years of building customer service centers for the most extensive media organizations in the US helped me develop genuine, service-focused, and efficient teams. Our business office should be helping, not hindering, Montana’s small businesses as they build back our economy. 

The Business Services Division must remain competent, accommodating, and fast. We will do our work quickly and accurately and let Montana’s business community get back to doing what it does best: growing Montana’s diverse private sector.

Every time a business is started, or a non-profit is formed, SoS assists in filing official registrations, articles of organization, assumed business names, and trademarks.

As a small business owner myself, I can attest that those services have suffered under the current Secretary of State and her mentor, Corey Stapleton. From the user end, work is more complicated and less efficient. Horror stories of week-long turnarounds for functions that are automated processes in most states are commonplace. Overbilling (double, even triple) Montana’s small businesses and then fighting in court, using Montana tax dollars, to avoid processing a refund is an unacceptable level of service to the business community.

If a coffee shack on the corner can refund a two-week-old transaction promptly, the Secretary of State sure as heck should be able to.

As your next Secretary of State, I will work to restore user experience and efficiency in the Business Services Division while keeping costs down. I will ensure small businesses and organizations get the same attention as large corporations. And I will ensure that my staff and all local officials have the tools they need to keep our economic engines humming.

Montana’s hard-working businesses and nonprofits deserve nothing less.