[upbeat music] - Our first guest, Democratic nominee, Elaine Marshall and longtime Secretary of State, incumbent, if you will.

Good to see you, Secretary.

- Thanks Kelly.

It's good to be here and thank you for that little history lesson.

I sometimes tell folks the office is older than the state and they look at me like, wow.

And it is and some of the things that the Colonial Secretary of State did, we do today.

- You're the record keeper of the state and this is just a fun question, not even on my script here, but do you still have old records from 1600s and 1700s on file?

- We do.

We do.

We've digitized everything, however, though, but historical things we have and we have things locked up under many locks and keys that are just really valuable signatures and records of the state.

- Well, let's talk about your candidacy and your work as Secretary of State since 1997.

This state changes every four years.

So if you only do your candidacy every four years, thousands of new voters may not know who Elaine Marshall is, but millions more do.

Who are you and what have you done for the last 27 years?

- Okay, I've done a lot.

I am Elaine Marshall.

I'm a native of Maryland.

I came here right after college.

I was raised on a family farm.

My dad's a farmer and my mother was a church organist and a farmer's wife, which is really an occupation.

She also taught music at home.

I'm a product of 4H in the public schools.

4H was very, very important to me growing up.

That's where I learned a lot of leadership and public speaking and parliamentary procedure and all kinds of valuable things that I use today, every day.

I'm a home economist.

I came to North Carolina and taught in the public schools of Lenoir County, also at Lenoir Community College and I started some businesses, a card and gift business, a decorating business, a college bookstore that was a spinoff of the other bookstore and then I was divorced and I needed to reinvent Elaine and that's when I went to Campbell Law School.

I was living in Harnett County and Campbell had started a new law school and it was in its opening days and it was actually the best thing I ever did to reinvigorate myself, acquire a new profession.

I practiced everyday law, country girl law, I used to call it, in Harnett County, everything that came through the door with some exceptions.

But I then served in the North Carolina Senate and then became Secretary of State actually doing a lot of the things that I did in the private practice of law, forming businesses, lending agreements, contracts, all of the kinds of things that are involved in the Secretary of State's Office.

- What is it about state service that bites you, gives you that bug to wanna serve?

And this goes to other offices as well and other peoples as well.

I've always wondered, you're a lawyer, you had your own office, you've built businesses, but you end up Secretary of State.

- Yeah, but being a lawyer, you're a problem solver for people, you learn about their personal lives and their needs and some very compelling things and then some problems in the law that you think, like the domestic law, I was doing a lot of domestic in my practice and actually equitable distribution came on and that was one of the things that motivated me to run for the North Carolina Senate.

We needed some female voices at the General Assembly and to point out issues and inequalities in the law and things to make more standards and just back then women they weren't entitled to, even if they owned the property during marriage, the husband was in control and could receive all the money.

So there were really some antiquated laws on the books that had to go and then with equitable distribution, it became fairer for women if something happened to that marriage.

So problem solving is what I do as Secretary of State.

There are issues that affect the whole business community.

The biggest problem we solved was changing the antiquated, static clunky version of a website into something that today is held out as a modern way that citizens and businesses should be able to interact.

We are very much encouraging online filing.

When the pandemic came around, we started seeing this tremendous increase in new LLCs and corporations coming along and my tech staff, and I do have a tech staff, we decided we had to upgrade the forms and the online filings and now we have been able to take out a lot of the choke points when you're processing a lot.

We had a 50,000 entity increase in one single year and had we not developed this technology, we'd have been dead in the water.

- Hold on.

You dropped a fancy term, entity.

You're saying 50,000 people tried to start 50,000 new businesses?

- New businesses.

An entity is a new business.

It could be a nonprofit, to us, it could be a LLC or it could be a corporation.

Most people are filing LLCs these days.

- What does adding even 50,000 above average, what does that do to this state's economy to have so many people trying to start so many small entities, nonprofits?

- It's huge, it's huge.

So many of our people employed by small businesses.

It's vitality for rural communities and I'm really focusing on rural economic development in the last two years and wanna do more going forward.

The ecosystem for people starting businesses around Raleigh, Durham, Charlotte, pretty strong.

But you get out to Bertie County, Bladen County, Swain County, the ecosystem for entrepreneurs getting started is pretty thin.

However, North Carolina nonprofits and federal entities have lots of help, but the people don't know about it.

So there's a significant knowledge gap.

When we started seeing all these new entities, we started surveying them to find out what they needed, what they would've liked and the upshot of that is a program called Rural Rise.

R-I-S-E stands for resources, for innovators, startups and entrepreneurs and this is a way that we communicate in these rural areas with local information for them.

Where in their county can they get help on getting their books right.

Where can they get help on HR.

Where can they get help on legal for small businesses starting up without having to hire professionals all around that, in some cases, don't even exist.

Our community colleges have wonderful small business centers and people just don't know about it.

There are also nonprofits out there.

We've even found zero interest lenders.

Getting people ready for the financial aspects of where they might be four or five years down the road starts the day that they file really, getting their books in order so that they're credit worthy so that they can get that loan or get that truck or buy that piece of property, which really helps anchor a business.

Today, every business day that we're open, we are forming between 650 and 700 new business entities.

That is whiplash territory.

- How long does it take to start a business?

From the time I go home tonight and tell the family I wanna start one, I have to file with you, of course, Secretary of State.

Is it a weeks, months, years long delay days?

- Well, now it depends.

You really should have some business consultation before you actually form.

You should be doing some research.

Is the name available, you want, or does somebody else has it, you can't have it.

All of that kind of stuff.

Our technology doesn't allow you to make that mistake, but there needs to be some preliminary consideration about how you're gonna do it, how you're gonna set it up.

But if you come to us, generally we can turn these around in a period of a week or maybe a little longer, depending if it's a rush time.

My goal is always three to five days.

However, I don't have enough staff to do that.

I don't have enough technology to do that.

But we are right now turning them around very quickly.

I deal with lawyers every day who are very happy with the speed that we turn 'em around if there are no problems with it.

- With with COVID sparking a lot of first time business owners setting up LLCs and other nonprofit organizations, do you see that as a bubble in our history that is just captured in that pandemic era or did it start a trend of accelerated business development?

- It has started a trend.

After that first year, that 50,000 bump, that took us up to about 178,000 that year.

We have not dropped below 170,000 any year since then.

So while it's eased off a little bit, it has not eased off very much.

That's why I say 650 to 700 today.

Those are between those two numbers.

- So, I get it's 2024 and we have computers, we have the gigabit fiber internet, you have a new website and it's moving faster.

Have the fundamentals of business creation through the Secretary of State's Office changed at all over those years?

Are we deregulated from the nineties or are we more regulated or are we just smarter?

- Exactly the same regulations, but we're able to deliver the services a lot faster.

The law hasn't changed very much.

The General Assembly says what you have to have to create this new entity, whatever it might be, that has to be reported to the state and then annual renewal every year to keep it updated and make sure that you're current active.

Every day other businesses use our website, which is free, 24/7.

Other states, it's not free.

I'm keen on keeping it free.

'Cause every day buy, sell, lend, borrow, invest, ensure decisions are made and those little snippets of information are up there.

Due diligence, banks, when they open accounts, insurance companies don't write a policy on a commercial vehicle or a piece of land unless they know that that entity is current active.

So all of those little important pieces of information are available 24/7.

That's why North Carolina's number one.

Number two, in doing business, ease of formation, ease of filing, all of that, those kind of things go into the evaluations that allows North Carolina, it's our competitive edge, which allows North Carolina to maintain.

- You know, the politics in Raleigh and how they are, how they have been and how they they're likely to be going into the future.

How resilient has your office been in navigating the different types of leadership and getting what you need from Republican budget writers as well as back when Democrats were doing that budget?

You've managed to do it somehow.

- Well, business is not a red, blue, Democrat, Republican concept.

Everybody wants North Carolina to grow.

I think everybody wants people to fulfill their dreams, whether it's being employed by some company or starting their own and having a little more management over their time and that kind of thing.

So we've had good support from the legislature with regard to our policies.

With regard to financing, this General Assembly is not very keen on increasing more state employee members.

That's been difficult for us.

And at the same time, acquiring appropriate technology financing is also very difficult.

We could do more if we had more.

- Do you see artificial intelligence playing that role?

If legislators don't want to expand the state government personnel ranks, could you use computers to do the thinking and the talking and the assisting for North Carolina business creators?

- I suppose it is possible.

I don't know that we're at that level here at the state.

Our main state IT office has not yet given directives of the parameters that we should be considering in using artificial intelligence.

I think there are some opportunities, but yet I'm not sure where the boundaries on those are.

- Got about one minute left.

What would you like to see the Secretary of State's Office do better or evolve and improve upon?

- Well, I'd really like there to be widespread economic opportunity through the Secretary of State's Office.

Rural counties are losing population, they're losing leadership and if we can have homegrown there.

In our survey of over 4,000 folks that started during the pandemic, a lot of them have two or more employees.

A lot of them are making at least $50,000.

So that's a good start.

We don't wanna lose these.

We wanna give them more life for a longer period of time and in the rural areas that is beyond essential.

We just need to make sure that our rural areas are vibrant 'cause the worst thing that can happen is somebody that wants to come back home to their family.

They've gotten educated or training somewhere else and say, "Mom, dad, I just can't come back "or my spouse won't come back."

We've got to make sure that North Carolina is equally accepting and vibrant all across the state.

That's got to be our future.

That's got to be our hope.

- All right, this is a Democratic nominee for Secretary of State and incumbent, Elaine Marshall.

Ms. Marshall, thank you so much as always for coming to PBS North Carolina and being on "State Lines."

I think the first time you've been on this set.

- It is.

Thanks.

- Thank you very much.

[upbeat music]