Tracy Lewis on Small Business Impact, the Capital Education Gap, and Why Equity Starts With Access to Opportunity

By Kekeletso Nkele, small.news Assistant

Q: What’s your honest assessment of the world of economic development and its efforts to help small businesses succeed?

A: I think we sometimes get distracted by what’s shiny and new. We have to think about numbers in this industry, but we focus on the large numbers and not their cumulative effect.

When I was getting my master’s degree, I studied economic development incentives at the municipal level, and I quickly saw that it can be a race to the bottom. Cities give away incentives for big numbers, and people approve them for large corporations because they’re going to bring in 300 jobs. Nobody asks whether those jobs are being transferred from somewhere else, or whether they’ll take workers and customers away from small businesses.

We need to embrace the cumulative impact small businesses have on our economy. I believe a very high percentage of businesses in Texas are small businesses driving the economy, and the Small Business Administration defines those as employing 500 people or fewer. If most businesses in a state employ at those numbers, the aggregate is a lot of people. And when you employ 500 people or fewer, someone knows someone who knows someone, which shrinks those six degrees of separation.

So we have to stop looking at the big, shiny, new numbers and think about how small businesses support our economy, our neighborhoods, and our social infrastructure. There’s a lot of talk these days about livable wages and affordability and how they affect that infrastructure. Small businesses are a place where we can change that dynamic. As a small business owner, you’re not going to cheat your neighbor, who may well end up working for you.

That’s my honest opinion.

Q: What is an example of work you’ve done in Detroit, Chicago, Richmond, Dallas, anywhere that you think is really hopeful?

A: I have two examples, one from Dallas and one from Richmond.

In Dallas, I saw an opportunity late last year with the World Cup coming to town. It was a legacy moment and a huge economic driver, and I started asking what we were doing for small businesses. There was plenty of focus on tourism and hotels, but this was a chance for Dallas to showcase its cultural footprint and what makes the city unique. We asked how to get people together so small businesses, especially those within the footprint of the activities, would be ready. There wasn’t much conversation about it. I’m a connector and convener, and I like to work behind the scenes, but people encouraged me to step forward, so we did.

We worked with three local chambers, including the Dallas Black Chamber and the Hispanic Chamber, and held events that brought together small business owners, capital providers, business support organizations, and other small businesses that offer coaching on financial readiness and preparing your team, including how to get your restaurant ready if you run one. We got an overwhelming response in a very short period of time.

One small business owner couldn’t get into the fan festival, but at one of my events she met a developer who is building a complex, which I believe is in Rockwall. He learned about her product, and now they’re working together on a storefront location there. We were trying to connect businesses to larger economic development, and a lot of connections like that were made.

In Richmond, we run a program that gives small businesses coaching. It took a long time to build traction, but the more people see the tools we’ve built and the real-time technical expertise we offer, the more they come away with something usable. It’s not “here’s the book, go home and study it while you run your business.” They have grand openings. They bring more partners to the table. We’re not just handing out expertise; people are seeing the fruits of our labor in businesses that are opening and gaining traction. We hosted an event in Richmond in July, and agencies were impressed and now want to be part of it.

We don’t treat small businesses as an afterthought, which is one of my critiques of large-scale economic development. We do it with intention. At every event, we have a small business involved. If a small business is catering, for example, and gets the chance to shine, sometimes guests say, “I need you to cater my event.” That’s what I mean by creating opportunities for small businesses in real time.

Q: When you see all these big changes happening in the world right now, what are you most worried about, specifically as it relates to small businesses?

A: The technical and capital gap to keep up.

There’s a divergence in the dialogue around technology. Some predictions about AI are dire, but small businesses also need AI and need to know how to leverage it. We have to be careful about the messaging and education that’s available, and about the realities of adoption.

Then there’s the capital gap. At a leadership session I attended last year, one speaker said something that stuck with me: we don’t have an access-to-capital gap. There are ways to access capital. You just have to know how to go after it and how to use it. So it’s more of an education gap, a pathway gap. The capital is there. How you get it, what you do with it, and when you access it is the challenge.

Q: What are you hopeful about?

A: There are more tools available than ever. The internet can be a blessing and a curse, but there’s more opportunity now than there has ever been. More people like us are emerging and using technology to get the message out that you can do this, and more people are tuned in to hearing and being inspired by the stories of small business owners.

Take my story. We went from three- and four-thousand-dollar contracts to six-figure contracts overnight, and before the contracts started coming in, I had moments of eating ramen. When people hear that reality and connect to it, they see it’s not impossible. That’s what keeps me going, and it’s what makes me real and transparent in the conversations I have. The more of that exists, the better the chance for small businesses to be impactful, connected to their community, and at center stage, which is what I think we all want.

Q: If you had a Magic Silver Wand and could make one thing true for small businesses right now, what would you use it for?

A: Equity and access to opportunity. I’d want us to weigh the merit of a business, its opportunity, and the why behind it as equally as we weigh the numbers, the cash, and the profit margins. And I’d want us to stop treating systemic barriers like race, sexual identity, and gender as barriers. I’d eliminate those, look at the human behind the business, and create equity from there.

Q: How can our community support you?

A: You can follow us on Facebook at Lewis and Associates and on Instagram at Lewis Associates.

We’re passionate about helping businesses with their architecture and how it affects their bottom line, and I give out free tools on that all the time. Following us and sharing our story and resources helps elevate and validate the work we do. We design these systems for larger entities, but we also design them with the small business in mind. What’s different about us is that I’m a practitioner and also a small business owner, so I understand both sides.

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