Читать книгу The New Builders - Seth Levine - Страница 32

Most entrepreneurial dreams start in parts of the economy that are the most personal, places like restaurants, professional services businesses, and hair salons. At least one in five new businesses started in America are in the food and restaurant sectors or health, beautify, and fitness businesses. Food and restaurants were the most common business started in 2018. They accounted for 11 percent of all business starts, tied with “Business Services,” a broad category covering everything from accounting and financial services to people who set up as “consultants” between more traditional jobs. General retail falls just behind at 10 percent of all new business starts, encompassing all sorts of Main Street shops and storefronts, as well as the maker spaces that are turning into mainstays in some communities.

Businesses like Isaac's aren't sexy, but they are found in the sectors of our economy that employ people at far greater rates than the high‐flying companies of Silicon Valley fame. In many technology businesses, profitability is the result of how few people they employ relative to their size. For example, Facebook employed just 17,000 people to serve 2 billion users in 2017, compared to the New York Times, which, despite job cuts, employed more than 3,500 people to serve its 2.3 million digital subscribers that same year. Operational efficiency, as it is often described, means doing as much as possible with as few people as possible. And by their nature, most of today's high‐tech companies are very good at generating revenue with relatively few employees. Not so with the service sector of our economy, especially smaller businesses.

Taken together, these small businesses are the employment and economic engines of our economy and critical infrastructure for our future economic well‐being as a nation. Of the 5.6 million employer firms in the United States in 2016, 99.7 percent had fewer than 500 workers. Eighty‐nine percent had fewer than 20 workers.⁴ Outside health care and government, our main private industry employers pre‐pandemic were in retail, leisure, and professional services: 62 million jobs out of 169 million. Companies like Isaac's are the absolute bulwark of the American economy, which means grassroots entrepreneurs like Isaac have to be at the center of our effort to revive the economy after the pandemic.

Owning a grassroots small business that steadily throws off enough profit to invest, or has an asset base that builds over time, remains a solid path to wealth creation – just not as common a path as it used to be. As entrepreneurship in America has declined, so have the fortunes of the middle class. Before 2010, the middle class owned more wealth than the top 1 percent. Not so since that time. As has been widely reported, the share of wealth held by the middle class has steadily declined, while the top 1 percent's share has steadily increased.⁵

The lack of access to entrepreneurial endeavors at least in part explains discrepancies in our society. More than 400 years of disproportionate treatment is a lot to overcome, and our country's long history of educational, economic, and societal inequality has had an enduring toll. The average White family in America has nearly 10 times the wealth of the average Black or Latino family. Many Black families who have established themselves in the middle or upper‐middle class are only one generation into that income and wealth class. Even for Black families who are climbing the education and income ladder, wealth lags. The average Black family where the head of household has a college education has less than one‐third the wealth of a similarly situated White family. That same Black family lags in wealth even compared to a White family where the head of household only holds a high school degree. Net worth across income brackets also lags significantly behind for Black families. This is true for every decile of income bracket from top‐earning Black families, who have one‐fifth the wealth of their top decile White counterparts, to the lowest 20 percent of earners, where Black families have around one‐quarter of the wealth of similarly situated White families.⁶

Most Black people have an idea for a business, Isaac told us. “Most of the people I know are trying to do something. If you're Black you have something else going on that you're trying to build – every Black person I know has a business idea, even if they don't have the means to make it happen.” In the broader culture, entrepreneurship, once a hallmark of American lore, is deemphasized in almost every aspect of our lives. Little of the entrepreneurial economy's reality or power is reflected anymore in our business media, pop culture, or politics.