Small Businesses Pay the Highest Price for a Fragmented Field
Building a small business takes a village. Owners and entrepreneurs wear many hats themselves, but there's a whole world of support systems out there to tap into -- if you can find them. In practice, that means trying to figure out:
What kind of capital should I take on?
How do I expand my customer base?
Where should I source quality talent?
Where can I go to talk to others who face these challenges?
Most of this happens on top of actually running the business. Entrepreneurs are answering these questions in stolen hours -- between payroll, customer calls, and other work that keeps the lights on.
This imperfect process creates unequal outcomes and often impacts Black, Latino, and women-owned small businesses. The village that's supposed to help is often part of the problem: more organizations and more support systems should mean fewer barriers. But each one adds another program to navigate -- and that weight falls hardest on the small businesses without someone already on the inside, the very ones these programs were designed to serve.
The structural reasons run deep: in the US, White families have on average 13 times the wealth of Black families and six times that of Hispanic families (McKinsey, 2023). Entrepreneurs less connected to wealthy communities know fewer people who can lend financial or social capital. They end up relying on cold outreach rather than warm introductions -- a route that is significantly less likely to work -- and have less exposure to the networks that make entrepreneurship easier to navigate. Women-owned businesses now represent 39.2% of all US businesses, but generate only 6.2% of total business revenue. If women-owned businesses achieved the same average revenue as men-owned businesses, the US economy would see an additional $10.2 trillion in annual revenue. At the current pace of progress, it would take 120 years to close that gap. (Wells Fargo, 2025)
Entrepreneurs aren't struggling because no one is trying to help. They're struggling because everyone is -- separately, at every level of government.
At the federal level alone, the Small Business Administration runs multiple entrepreneurship support programs, including Small Business Development Centers, Women's Business Centers, and SCORE. And that's one agency among many (Congressional Research Service, 2026). Layer state programs, city programs, neighborhood economic development organizations, business improvement districts, nonprofits, accelerators, and chambers on top, and you get a system in which a single entrepreneur can plausibly be served by half a dozen organizations across multiple government levels for the same need.
The Urban Institute, in a February 2024 report based on more than 150 stakeholder interviews and a comprehensive review of federal small business support programs, captured what this looks like on the ground: "a vast and overwhelming range of technical assistance offerings, with varying degrees of quality and frequent overlap, making navigating them challenging for entrepreneurs." The same report described the underlying small business advice system as "highly complex, with multiple programs run by various agencies," leading to particular difficulties for small businesses in remote areas or led by non-English speakers.
How this challenge shows up for small business owners varies place to place, but the underlying complexity remains the same. It shows up as bad websites, outdated portals, application forms that don't talk to each other, intake processes that ask the same questions a dozen times, and program descriptions that haven't been updated in years. Getting through to support is often as much a barrier as the support landscape itself.
For an entrepreneur with built-in social capital, this is mostly an inconvenience -- they can call a connected friend who points them to the right door. For an underrepresented entrepreneur already overcoming network and wealth gaps, layered complexity is one more barrier stacked on top of the ones we just named. The system rewards entrepreneurs who already know which door to knock on.
The cost of this duplication shows up at three connected levels:
At the entrepreneur level: entrepreneurs, especially those who are underrepresented, spend time and effort navigating an overlapping landscape, time that should go toward building their business. Some self-select out before they ever apply, while others end up in programs without proven outcomes that fall short of their expectations.
At the intermediary level: organizations doing this work end up competing for the same funders, the same entrepreneurs, and the same outcomes -- reinventing services that already exist somewhere else, drifting from the work they're best positioned to do, and stretching capacity thin in the process.
At the economic development level: when intermediaries compete instead of coordinate, the public and philanthropic dollars meant to strengthen local economies get absorbed by redundancy. In a tighter funding environment, that's a policy failure -- one paid for by the businesses and the workers they employ.
The cost compounds across all three -- a vicious cycle in which entrepreneurs self-select out, intermediaries reinvent the wheel, and the local economy loses the small businesses that anchor it. An inclusive economy requires the opposite: a virtuous cycle, where coordinated work across entrepreneur support, intermediary capacity, and economic development strengthens each link in turn.
What this looks like in practice: NYC
A small business owner in New York City can seek help from federal Small Business Development Centers, state Entrepreneurship Assistance Centers, city Business Solutions Centers, and neighborhood economic development organizations -- plus business improvement districts, dozens of CDFIs and chambers, university-based programs, and nonprofit accelerators. They're each doing real work, funded differently, structured differently, and run by different teams -- but many offer services that overlap heavily.
The same entrepreneur could plausibly be served by four different organizations across four different funding levels of government for the same need. As Mayor Mamdani put it in March 2026: "From the bodega on your corner to the laundromat that's anchored your block for decades, small businesses are the lifeblood of New York City. They're where working people build dreams -- and for too long, City Hall has made that harder than it needs to be, burying storefronts in red tape while corporate chains get the fast lane." The disparity goes deeper than red tape. The same fragmentation that frustrates a bodega owner trying to navigate city permits also frustrates them trying to find the support that exists across nonprofits, accelerators, and community organizations.
This is the problem the Main Street NYC Ecosystem Map was built to address. Visionaries is a community of 500+ businesses across 50+ industries who have graduated from 15+ NYCEDC-backed entrepreneurship programs in NYC. NYCEDC launched it in partnership with Visible Hands and Main Street Assembly. In the first annual survey to entrepreneurs, navigating NYC's small business support landscape surfaced as the top challenge.
By building on what already exists, the map focuses on delivering value by organizing existing partner offerings around entrepreneur needs, making that data queryable and comparable, and connecting entrepreneurs directly to vetted partner contacts.
Taking our own advice
Those of us doing this work tell entrepreneurs, all the time, to double down on what they're best at. To stop trying to do everything themselves. To find partners whose strengths complement their own. We tell them this because it's the right advice. It's also advice we don't take ourselves.
The amount of reinvention in this field is hard to overstate. How many accelerators does a city need? How many funds? How many programs offering the same advice on capital access, marketing, and operations? The honest answer in most places is: far fewer than we have.
Taking our own advice looks like:
Starting from what already exists. The field is full of programs, funders, and partners doing real work. The first move is to make that work more findable and more usable.
Working across the silos the field usually keeps separate. Entrepreneur development, workforce, and ecosystem building are connected in practice. Treating them as separate limits what any one of them can do.
Paying attention to what's actually working. A coordinated field requires knowing which support is useful, which is outdated, and where the gaps are -- and that distinction is often invisible from the outside.
Building for collaboration. A more navigable system lets each organization specialize in what they do well. No one can be everything to everyone, and the work is stronger when we stop pretending otherwise.
This is the orientation Main Street Assembly was built around. We're an integrator. We work across entrepreneur and small business development, workforce, and ecosystem building rather than treating them as separate streams. These three are interdependent -- progress in any one requires progress in the others. Our focus is on underrepresented entrepreneurs and small businesses, the entrepreneurs who pay the highest price when the field is fragmented.
If you're doing this work in a city, a region, an industry, or a community, the first move is to take an honest look at what's already there, where it falls short, and how entrepreneurs actually move through it. The field is full of programs. What it's short on is the connective tissue that lets entrepreneurs find them.
The funding environment isn't getting easier. A new wave of philanthropic capital is forming around AI -- in a May 2026 essay widely circulated across the philanthropy sector, Nan Ransohoff estimated that the OpenAI Foundation and Anthropic's founders and employees together hold approximately $370 billion in philanthropic assets, with $37 billion in new annual giving once that wealth becomes liquid. Where it goes is being decided now. New capital tends to attract new entrants. More money in the system means more organizations competing for it, including new ones built around the moment. The intermediaries best positioned to thrive are the ones already clear on what they do best, and clear on where their work ends and someone else's begins. Each of us deepening into our own expertise, and partnering across our collective gaps, is what will make this moment count.
Those of us in the field can shape what's coming. If you're great at something we're not, and you see something in our work that complements yours, come talk to us. We're trying to do better together.
Sources
McKinsey & Company, "Underestimated Start-Up Founders," 2023
Wells Fargo, "Impact of Women-Owned Businesses Report," 2025
Congressional Research Service, "Small Business Administration: A Primer on Programs and Funding," 2026