“ Come down to my store,” Steve Murray said, urgently, one day in the mid‐1990s. He'd reached Elizabeth, who at that time was a reporter with the Lancaster Sunday News, handling the cops and business beat on a small news staff.

Steve's store was about six blocks up Queen Street, one of the two main streets in the small city of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, about an hour‐and‐a‐half west of Philadelphia. Once prosperous, by the 1980s and 1990s, this historic city in the middle of tobacco country was struggling, having fallen into the familiar narrative of Main Street decline.

Steve never seemed to notice that the world around him didn't match his style. He stood in the middle of his vintage shop in a historic storefront, loving the Deep Throat role he'd given himself. Zap & Co. was filled to overflowing with brooches the size of lobster claws, hats like flying saucers, and floor‐length gowns and psychedelic shirts. Inventory that brought to mind Wallis Simpson, Lena Horne, and Cher, all at once.

And to an enterprising reporter, he was about to hand over the super‐secret plan for the economic revival of Lancaster City, prepared by business owners involved in a group called the Hourglass Foundation.

The group was goodhearted but blind, Steve thought. Most of them longed for the patriarchal presence of Armstrong World Industries, a giant flooring manufacturer that produced enough linoleum in the mid‐twentieth century to pave to the moon. But Armstrong was shrinking, replaced as Lancaster's largest employer by the local hospital. And, as in other cities, Lancaster's downtown was suffering from the lingering effects of White flight to the suburbs.

Steve thought the plan concocted by the big business leaders was all wrong. They wanted to tear down the beautiful old department store that anchored the town square for – “get this,” he said, his voice dripping with derision – “a chain hotel.”¹

He was a renegade business owner who believed deeply – passionately – that Lancaster was a beautiful place. That the fading Victorian buildings could regain their former glory, that people from big cities would flock to the small downtown if there were good restaurants and more shops like his. Twenty‐five years later, and only after Steve's point of view influenced the powers that be, he would prove to be right. Lancaster is in the middle of an economic renaissance.

Today's Lancaster is a vibrant small city, complete with an active downtown, a progressive mayor, and a growing national reputation as a place that has welcomed refugees without abandoning its conservative roots. In February 2018, Forbes named Lancaster one of the “10 Coolest US Cities to Visit,” describing it as “one of the US's best‐kept secrets” and “a cultural hotbed.”²

Former mayor Rick Gray gave credit where it was due, speaking to the Lancaster newspaper: “Without Steve's foresight a decade before the convention center was built, downtown would not be what it is today.”³

Dynamic economies are those that are in a constant state of change and motion. Businesses are continually being started, while others are failing and going out of business.⁴ A dynamic system is often propelled by innovations and inventions, as well as by new ideas and new ways of doing business. Dynamism is a key ingredient to the overall health of an entrepreneurial ecosystem as well as to our broader economy. But dynamism isn't just defined by growth, as it is often misunderstood to be. It also isn't solely the purview of big businesses or large industries. In fact, it is often the interplay between the small end of the economy and larger companies that provide an economy its dynamic traits – small firms nip at the heels of larger ones, forcing them to be more nimble and innovative; large firms force upstarts to search for new products and markets to gain a toehold. Dynamism is more appropriately understood as change that happens across many dimensions. Size is one dimension, of course, but so are changes in terms of quality, value, and experience, as measured by scales other than size and profit.ⁱ

Steve Murray, like another entrepreneur we'll meet in this chapter, Fred Sachs, was dynamism in action. Zap & Co. never grew large, but Steve was a key actor in creating the long‐term vision that would power the city's economy. Without him, the revival of an entire city might never have happened. A vibrant economy thrives on a certain amount of turnover, regeneration, and risk‐taking. Old ideas are replaced by new ones, and past ways of thinking and working are overtaken by novel approaches. Dynamism lives in people like Steve: entrepreneurs who run businesses at the smaller end of the business spectrum, but who bring passion and life to new ideas. We have been taking these small businesses – these engines of dynamism – for granted.

Today's New Builders share this trait with Murray: they are changemakers and trailblazers. And the numbers bear this out. “Small businesses create two‐thirds of net new jobs and are the driving force behind US innovation and competitiveness,” reported the SBA in 2018, which tracks business trends for the US government. Small businesses accounted for 44 percent of all economic activity in the United States and were responsible for $5.9 trillion in GDP in 2014, the last year for which complete data are available.⁵

As Steve's story shows, size has only a minor bearing on the power to create change. Sometimes, a small business owner acts alone to create change as an inventor, innovator, or leader. More often and more powerfully, owners act collectively, as employers and community builders, with the results of that collective action being powerful community change.

But in our collective search for convenience and lower prices, and in our embrace of size, we hardly see small businesses as the economic and community powerhouses they actually are. They are an irreplaceable part of the American experience, often finding creative solutions to everyday problems and bringing energy and focus to critical causes. Small business owners are the people whose passion for something is so crazy that they'll build a livelihood around it. And while they certainly don't have a lock on ethical business practices, you will often find them melding compassion and good business, doing good while doing well, and in many cases employing people on the margins of our society.

These are the reasons supporting New Builders is so important. We risk losing so much more than just economic output if we abandon these businesses. We lose a key part of what is in effect the soul of America.

Main Street USA

According to the statistics site FiveThirtyEight, “Main” is the most common street name in America, with 10,902 streets carrying this moniker. Strangely, the second most common street name in America is 2nd Street, followed by 1st Street – which seems counterintuitive but is backed by the data.⁶

The name Main Street has expansive connotations. It evokes nostalgia for smaller towns and simpler living. But, importantly, the idea of Main Street USA isn't just a part of our history and days gone by. It turns out that thriving Main Streets and the robust set of local entrepreneurs who line them, or who operate out of office parks, strip malls, and other clusters, are critical to our economy's future.

The high‐tech entrepreneurs who garner so much of our collective attention are a tiny sliver of the small businesses that drive the US economy. Fewer than 1 percent of entrepreneurs are backed by venture capital. Less than 250,000 businesses are “high‐tech.”

America's army of entrepreneurs includes many Main Street entrepreneurs – people whom we like to think of as grassroots entrepreneurs. Many New Builders come from their ranks and create much of the entrepreneurial activity across our nation. In the United States, small business is big business. Small businesses employ nearly half of the US workforce, over 60 million people. Smaller firms created over 1.6 million jobs in 2019. Importantly, firms that drove the most job growth were those that employed fewer than 20 people – a trend that matches that of prior years.

In a widely cited 2010 report, The Kauffman Foundation's Tim Kane argued that startups – companies less than a year into their existence – were responsible for essentially all of the job creation in the US economy.⁷ In other words, without entrepreneurs, our economy would not add new jobs. The report further notes, “Gross job creation at startups in the United States averaged more than three million jobs per year during 1992–2005, four times higher than any other yearly age group.”

There already was a cloud over the US small business economic engine. Even before the Covid‐19 pandemic, that same 2018 SBA report that described small businesses as the “driving force behind US innovation and competitiveness” showed that the percentage of overall economic output produced by smaller firms was declining relative to that of larger companies. In the 16 years from 1998 to 2014, the small business share of GDP fell to 43.5 percent from 48.0 percent, according to the report.

This shift away from recognizing the value of small business and the entrepreneurs who build them has occurred over the last 40 years. The Silicon Valley/high‐tech narrative is part of the reason. But there have been other changes in our economy that are important to understand as well.

How Big Became Beautiful

On September 13, 1970, economist Milton Friedman published one of the most influential essays in the history of business, “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits,” in the New York Times Magazine. It was, as the New York Times' DealBook staff noted in a retrospective published in 2020, “a call to arms for free‐market capitalism that influenced a generation of executives and political leaders, most notably Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.”⁸

DealBook's retrospective included reflections from Nobel Prize winners, corporate executives, and entrepreneurs who had grown large companies, but not a single small businessperson. This is the nature of reporting about business today. Serious opinions are the purview of those who have size on their side. That in itself is but one influence of Friedman's essay.

A lot of attention has been paid to Friedman lately, but too little has been paid to the effect of his thinking on the small business economy. In 1970, Friedman posited that shareholders were the most important stakeholders in the business world and, in his view, distributing profits to them was the most efficient economic system. At the time, Americans were becoming owners of public companies' stocks in increasing numbers, a trend that peaked in 2007 with about 65 percent of Americans owning public stock according to the polling firm Gallup. Lately this trend has reversed, with just over half of Americans – 55 percent – owning these securities.ⁱⁱ

Friedman's thinking changed the way corporations acted. It was common up until the 1970s for firms to reinvest their profits back into their businesses – into R&D and employee salaries and benefits. In his Harvard Business Review paper, “Profits without Prosperity,” Professor William Lazonick argues, “From the end of World War II until the late 1970s, a retain‐and‐reinvest approach to resource allocation prevailed at major US corporations. They retained earnings and reinvested them in increasing their capabilities, first and foremost, in the employees who helped make firms more competitive. They provided workers with higher incomes and greater job security.”⁹

After Friedman's seminal paper, the mantra quickly changed to become one that favored reducing costs and distributing the cash gains from those cost reductions to shareholders. Lazonick termed this new management imperative downsize‐and‐distribute.

The new approach favored value extraction over value creation (literally, taking cash out of businesses and putting it into shareholders' pockets). Along with the weakening of the power of labor, the rise of technology, and the increasing use of stock‐based compensation, this approach has contributed to increased income inequality and overall employment instability.

As Friedman famously put it, the only “social responsibility of business is to increase its profits.” Exacerbating this was the increasing use of stock‐based compensation for executives, which, while in theory aligning their interests with those of shareholders more broadly, in practical application served to drive short‐term profit‐seeking behavior. Not surprisingly, the largest component of the income of top earners (the top 0.1 percent) since the 1980s has been driven by stock‐based pay. This has also led to some unwanted market perversions. For example, from 2003 to 2012, the 449 companies of the S&P 500 listed through that entire period of time used the majority – 54 percent – of their earnings (a total of $2.4 trillion) to buy back their own stock. If you include dividends paid out during that period, 91 percent of earnings went to shareholders, leaving little left for reinvestment into these businesses.

This profit seeking behavior also had an effect on small business and the overall dynamism of the economy.

Why a Dynamic Economy Is Important

Milton Friedman's theories reshaped corporate practices, resulting in companies that were huge, not in terms of employees but in terms of resources, power, and access to capital. In 1964, the nation's most valuable company, AT&T, was worth $267 billion in today's dollars and employed 758,611 people.¹⁰ Today, Apple is worth more than $2 trillion but has only about 147,000 employees – less than a fifth the size of AT&T's workforce in its heyday.¹¹

Simply put, today's entrepreneurs face a nearly impossible uphill climb because large businesses are increasingly unchecked in their market power and profitability. At the same time, rising income inequality means fewer and fewer people have the savings to start businesses, a process that often means forgoing income for several years.

Almost like a living organism or a healthy forest, economies stay healthy by constantly building and changing. New firms are created, established firms grow, and outdated firms fail and close down. It's a balancing act between growth and consolidating market power and new businesses and new ideas nipping at the heels of incumbents. As just one example of this process in action, consider that the half‐life of companies on the Fortune 500 list of America's largest corporations is just 20 years, meaning that 20 years from now we can expect 250 from today's list to no longer be among the top 500 companies in the country. This is dynamism at work, and it's a powerful force in our economy.

But there are signs that dynamism in the United States is waning. A 2019 recent study by Ufuk Akcigit, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago, and Sina T. Ates, a senior economist at the Federal Reserve Board, developed a theory as to why dynamism is slowing.¹² They noted 10 factors:

1. Market concentration has risen.
2. Average markups have increased.
3. Average profits have increased.
4. The labor share of output has gone down.
5. The rise in market concentration and the fall in labor share are positively associated.
6. The labor productivity gap between frontier and laggard firms has widened.
7. Firm entry rate has declined.
8. The share of young firms in economic activity has declined.
9. Job reallocation has slowed down.
10. The dispersion of firm growth has decreased.

All of these factors are important, but several have direct implications for New Builders. Specifically, increasing market concentration, increasing profits, the correlation between the rise in market concentration and the fall in labor share, new firm entry rate, and the declining share of economic activity from newer firms all describe how larger firms are making up a greater share of the market and wielding more market power.

Many of these factors reinforce one another. Economic activity from newer businesses is going down (factor 8), which is related to the fact that fewer newer firms are being formed and entering the market (factor 7). This leads to a greater concentration (factor 1) and the consolidation of power of incumbent firms (which is causing profits to be increasing – factor 3 – at the same time these firms are relying less and less on labor – factor 4). It's a virtuous cycle. Or perhaps more aptly put, a vicious cycle.

Harvard economist Larry Katz described the increasing concentration of American business as one of the leading factors in the decline of dynamism as well, describing to us that “there has been really big growth in economies of scale…many traditional businesses can't compete with the large firms.”¹³

Of course, businesses create and shed jobs all the time. Critics of the idea that small businesses are an irreplaceable piece of the dynamic American economy have argued that studies that profess the power of small business job growth gloss over job losses incurred by those same startup firms after their first year of operations. The net job numbers for startups include only companies adding jobs; after year one, they include companies that are adding new jobs and companies that go out of business or shrink, in each case, shedding jobs.

Robert Atkinson and Michael Lind argued the case in their book, Big Is Beautiful. It's a provocative work that argues that small businesses are in fact not responsible for most of the country's job creation and innovation. In Atkinson and Lind's worldview, the only kind of small firm that contributes to innovation are technology startups – who, they point out, ubiquitously have the goal of becoming big businesses. They believe that the idea that small businesses are the foundation of our economy is a relic of past times and nostalgic thinking. They argue that both consumers and workers are better off buying from, and working for, large businesses. In their view, new small businesses create new jobs; however, they argue that these jobs are lost over time as those businesses eventually close.

While important to acknowledge differing views – especially ones that are well formulated and argued – for us, these arguments fall short and ring hollow. It is absolutely true that businesses fail at a relatively high rate. To us, that is not a limitation of small businesses but, in some regards, a feature to them. Of course, new businesses create a large share of jobs. But to argue that if they simply didn't exist, larger companies would create those same opportunities defies logic and sense. If that were true, larger businesses would be creating new jobs irrespective of what is currently taking place at small companies. Big businesses would be setting up shop on Main Streets, financing the first chocolatier in Arkansas, or starting a guiding company in the Bob Marshall wilderness. They are not.

Small businesses have a larger appetite for risk, and by virtue of their owners' passions, are sometimes willing to live with lower profits. An economy devoid of small businesses is a flat, uninspired landscape of sameness. To continue to thrive, America needs both big and small business and grassroots entrepreneurs of all backgrounds to create a living, vibrant entrepreneurial economy.

To be clear, large companies are important to our economy as well, and nothing in our experience meeting New Builders or in our work as a venture capitalist and journalist suggests that they're not. But by abandoning our startup economy, by failing to support New Builders, we risk a critical part of America's economic engine. Importantly, the struggle we're describing is not one of big business in conflict with small business. In fact, many of today's biggest businesses sell products and services to small businesses, which makes the danger even greater. Our economy is not a zero‐sum game and we don't need to choose sides. In fact, our economy should be viewed as positive‐sum.¹⁴ The American economy has thrived with both big and small businesses in balance. That balance ebbs and flows over time, but we need to recognize that we're in danger of letting that balance get dangerously, perhaps irreconcilably, out of whack. Stories of well‐loved small businesses closing their doors because they cannot compete with larger, and larger‐than‐life, businesses have become all too common.

Over the past 50 years, the US regulatory and political landscape has changed significantly. Those changes have generally helped larger businesses and hurt smaller ones. As much as politicians love to talk about their love of Main Street and the importance of small businesses, their actions largely have shown otherwise. So while we don't subscribe to the blanket “‘big is bad” mantra that some in the media like, even as they celebrate “scale” and high returns, we recognize through our research and reporting that our systems have become skewed too much in favor of large businesses. And in the places we've tended to support smaller enterprises, we've been overly focused on that tiny portion of new companies that have both the goal and the potential to become large businesses. In doing so, we've destroyed the level playing field that fits the entrepreneurial mythology of the American Dream and created one that stacks the odds against grassroots entrepreneurs.

There is another cost to our love affair with big. Over the past decades, we've narrowed our focus as to where innovation happens, and in doing so, we miss seeing where creativity occurs. Especially if it's on a smaller scale.

Innovation Comes from Surprising Places

In our economy many, if not most, innovative breakthroughs are born in small businesses. A few big businesses have defied the odds to remain innovative over time, but almost by definition, big companies work on incremental innovations – an effort to build upon the value of what they already own and often to protect the economic value of past innovations.¹⁵ The importance of small businesses in the process of innovation is one of the reasons that American government and media have showered so much time and attention on Silicon Valley and the technology industry. For a while, the Valley appeared to have a lock on the process of innovation, spawning thousands of small businesses – renamed startups in the high‐tech world. With a purpose‐made system of finance (venture capital, private equity, and the like), Silicon Valley has specialized in killing the startups that don't have fast‐growth potential and nurturing the ones that do into big companies – sometimes very, very big companies.

But like our dynamic economy, our much‐vaunted engine of innovation is showing signs of slowing down. Today, there are fewer entrepreneurs picking up the baton. We have a much less efficient system for funding ideas and companies because most of our systems of finance remain focused on a particular kind of new business founder: White males starting software or internet businesses. The barriers to women and people of color, as well as those from the lower rungs of our socioeconomic ladder, in particular, remain high, whether they are starting a technology company with the goal of scaling quickly or a business with different, yet equally important, goals. Additionally, class (perhaps better defined as caste) and age are also limiters of entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial vitality in the United States. In the long game of becoming an innovator/entrepreneur, almost the only people who succeed are those who are either born into privilege, or those who are so good at what they do, and so passionate about it that they are able to overcome the systemic barriers stacked against them.

Can You Tell an Innovator When You See One?

Fred Sachs is an inveterate entrepreneur. He bought his first company, a Main Street enterprise in Alexandria, Virginia, called Smoot Lumber, in his late thirties, and started a second one, a commercial door and hardware company, in time to ride Washington, DC's building boom in the 1980s. He sold them both, the first in 1996 and the second in 2008. He then started his third and invested in his fourth venture. In the first, a farm he owns in rural Virginia, he's experimenting with new strains of organic wheat. The second is a Canadian‐based startup that is working on developing medical diagnostic devices.

He learns something every time around, he told us. At 76, he's every bit a New Builder – and one of his key qualities, which perhaps surprisingly seems to sharpen with age, is the ability to innovate. When Fred interviewed with the consulting firm McKinsey back in 1972, they asked whether he was more innovative or creative. Over the years, he's learned that being an entrepreneur requires both. “Sometimes you have to create a solution to a particular problem; and in other situations you have to innovate in order to get around a particular hurdle. And if you're not going to deal with the problem, you're going to be left behind. You have to continue to change.”

Many successful entrepreneurs are older, in their forties, fifties, and beyond – a fact that has been obscured by our obsession with technology entrepreneurship, where founders often skew younger (certainly our myth of the startup founder does). Paul Graham, an investor in entrepreneurs and a co‐founder of the famous Silicon Valley accelerator Y Combinator, once quipped that “the cutoff in investors' heads is 32… After 32, they start to be a little skeptical.”¹⁶

This certainly maps to how the media portrays startup founders, but a closer look tells a different story. The average age of entrepreneurs when they start their companies is 42, researchers at MIT and the US Census Bureau found. And, perhaps bucking the conventional wisdom of Silicon Valley, the average age of a technology founder is nearly the same: 40.¹⁷

Interestingly, the time we spent with New Builders suggests that entrepreneurs might actually get more innovative as they get older. Early successes free older entrepreneurs to play with ideas, and they often have extensive networks built up over time that they can leverage in new ventures. Innovation and entrepreneurship for many older entrepreneurs seem to become something of a habit.

After Fred Sachs sold his first two companies, he planned to spend time on his small farm in Eastern Virginia. But an entrepreneur's mind is hard to disengage, and before long he was producing organic flour from Virginia‐grown grains. First it was a hobby, but quickly his entrepreneurial juices began to flow. By 2018, Grapewood Farm was producing tons of flour, which it sold to regional bakers for upwards of $7.00 a pound, depending on the variety.ⁱⁱⁱ

“I think we could probably do twice as much business as we're doing now, because it's unique and people are interested in eating healthy foods and buying local,” he said. Meanwhile, he's also working on and investing in his medical diagnostic device business.^iv

Innovation and Invention; Entrepreneurship and Science

Innovation has a fuzzy definition, and it's often confused with invention (also not always crisply defined). For our purposes, we think of innovation as a broad term. Many, if not all, entrepreneurs and especially New Builders, are engaged in our innovation economy. Breakthrough innovations, like the silicon chip that laid the foundation for Silicon Valley, often take a long time and large amounts of money – from the first germ of an idea in a scientist's lab to market. But once they're realized and in the market, they create huge amounts of economic energy, spawning follow‐on breakthroughs and incremental innovations. The spirits of science and entrepreneurship are often entwined, especially in pursuit of these breakthrough innovations. Thomas Edison is a classic example. The phonograph, the motion picture camera, and the light bulb grew out his ability to turn invention into a business process. He found likeminded funders – including Henry Ford (an innovator in manufacturing processes) and Harvey Firestone (the rubber and automobile tire magnate). In the mid‐twentieth century, Otis Boykin,¹⁸ who was Black, invented electronic control devices for guided missiles, IBM computers, and pacemakers. It's a sign of how much harder Black innovators had to work that he ended up in a lawsuit with his employer, Chicago Telephone Supply Corporation, claiming the company was trying to steal his early research for the pacemaker. He lost the lawsuit but left CTS Labs to work on his inventions through his own research and consulting company.

While it's easy to pick through history for stories of the genesis of inventions and innovations that we often take for granted in everyday life, it's much harder to imagine innovations that didn't happen. We described a version of this phenomenon in Chapter 1 when we talked about ghost companies – those businesses that never got off the ground and whose impact on our society will never be known. That these companies are invisible (they quite literally don't exist) is one of the reasons that they have been easy to ignore.

Much of America's innovation comes from companies at the smaller end of the spectrum. That many of these businesses are failing to come into existence is alarming from an economic perspective, but perhaps even more so as seen through the lens of our innovation pipeline. For example, early in the pandemic, researchers in bioscience and health spoke to us of innovations that they hadn't been able to develop, not because the science wasn't promising, but because they lacked support for projects. These included fast‐growing tissue samples for vaccine testing and better ways to build trust for testing and vaccination programs with minority populations. That America is producing fewer new businesses suggests that large swaths of innovation are simply not occurring. Whether it's due to lack of resources, lack of investment in education, training, or a changing relationship with failure that is dampening our entrepreneurial spirit, the fact is by producing fewer new companies our economy is missing out.

The government plays a significant role in funding innovation of the breakthrough kind, especially because breakthrough innovations often don't have the obvious near‐term market applications that private‐sector investors or corporations like to see. But we have been systematically and methodically underfunding research through government channels over the past decades. In his book Jump‐Starting America, MIT professor Jonathan Gruber found that although total US spending on research and development remains at 2.5 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), the share coming from the private sector has increased to 70 percent, up from less than half in the early 1950s through the 1970s.¹⁹ Federal funding for R&D as a share of GDP is now below where it was in 1957, according to the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF). Measured by government funding for university research as a share of GDP, the United States ranks 28th of 39 nations. Twelve of those nations invest more than twice as much as America does on a proportionate basis.²⁰

In other words, the private sector, with its focus on fast profits and familiar patterns – and in the corporate sphere, on maintaining power – now dominates America's innovation spending. Today, even promising entrepreneurs with ideas that lack immediate commercial applications are often abandoned in favor of those with more near‐term promise. And evidence is emerging that big companies may be buying smaller ones in order to control (and perhaps time) their innovations.²¹

The Easy Story of the Big Movers

Historically, Americans see themselves as champions of the underdog. There has been a special place in American history for those individuals who, through sheer determination and grit, forged ideas that changed industries and ultimately laid the foundation for new parts of the American economy. We've honored the Main Street entrepreneurs who spent their energy in the interests of building healthy communities, and in so doing, helped keep our economy dynamic. But in recent years, we've seemingly lost that part of our story. We've forgotten to value it. Even worse, we often seem to be actively devaluing it in favor of big business.

A few years before Steve Murray, whose story starts this chapter, died, he helped put on a fashion show at a local nursing home. The elderly ladies put on glamorous floor‐length gowns, all silk and taffeta, with peplums and the long silhouettes of the World War II era. A woman named Vanda waltzed down the aisle of folding chairs in a fawn‐colored number with sequined shoulders that looked like it ought to be brushing the floor of a New York City nightclub to Tommy Dorsey music. And there, in the back of the room, was Steve, leaning on a clothing rack. He'd lent the dresses to the ladies, and from the smile on his face, it was clear that he was loving every minute of it. He really did have a rare eye for beauty – a gift he lent to his community.

After the story about Steve Murray's role in Lancaster's revitalization was published, the economic development director for the state of Pennsylvania wrote his boss, then Pennsylvania Treasurer Joe Torsella. “Maybe we've been doing economic development all wrong,” he said.²²

But strangely, Steve is being written out of the Lancaster narrative in other places. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote a story about Lancaster's revitalization that celebrated the role of big business people – the very Hourglass Foundation Murray had battled – as the changemakers.

“They realized that the only way they could replace Armstrong (World Industries) and reenergize the downtown was not with another dominant company, but by throwing partisan politics out the window and forming a complex adaptive coalition in which business leaders, educators, philanthropists, social innovators, and the local government would work together to unleash entrepreneurship and forge whatever compromises were necessary to fix the city,” Friedman wrote.²³

The famous anthropologist Margaret Mead acknowledged our propensity to believe that big institutions create change and the reality that they don't when she said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed it's the only thing that ever has.”²⁴

In truth, Lancaster's transformation needed both Murray's cussedness and the support and deep pockets of the powers‐that‐be. But it's the role of the influential changemaker that's getting lost in today's telling of the story. Not all entrepreneurs are in the mold of Steve Murray or Fred Sachs. Many simply want to run their businesses and create a good life for themselves and their families.

But we can't lose sight of the importance of these key New Builders who take it upon themselves to lift their entire communities. One of the most important things we uncovered in researching and talking with New Builders around the country is the power of an individual visionary in a supportive community. It's easy to ignore individual small businesses because, by their nature, they are small. But together, they comprise a powerful group.

Perhaps this is what is most surprising to learn: just how impactful New Builders are in their communities. In a world where business success is too often defined by size and profit margins, these New Builders are pushing back and redefining – perhaps realigning – the metrics we use to judge success.