The New Builders. Seth Levine
gathered in the elementary school library, he saw himself. “I grew up a couple of miles away from here,” he said. “These kids are me.”1
The elementary school, the Academy for Integrated Arts, “wasn't in the best part of town,” he said. But the hallways were decorated with art, and he was heartened by the stories he was hearing: of progress, of hope. A number of the students had made breakthroughs, especially through an innovative yoga program – one that Isaac helped found and fund – that was brought to the school. Instead of acting out in class, they were learning to calm themselves by taking a break for a few yoga poses. Although it might be counterintuitive to think of groups of elementary kids breaking out into yoga for a quick respite, the program was working. On field trips, the boys in particular liked to show off their poses. The tougher ones, of course, like the chair pose.
Most of the kids were minorities, primarily Black and Hispanic. All the kids had name tags, and the mats fanned out in a circle rather than in rows. The central idea was to teach the kids a way to regulate their emotions and a positive way to play.
A successful restaurateur, Isaac had started the Superhero Yoga nonprofit on the side with two friends, Janis King and Laurie Bomba, to bring half‐hour yoga classes to schools in poor neighborhoods. And he loved it – he meditated and practiced yoga himself. But he struggled with what to tell the kids sometimes when he had opportunities to speak with them. He didn't like all the talk about saving people – especially saving Black people. In his mind it wasn't about that. It was about liberating people from a fundamentally wrong system. He wanted the kids to focus on accessing the resources they needed to succeed. He tried to inspire them to do that by telling his own story, as the son of two felons and who was now a successful businessman and community leader – the owner of three Yogurtini stores in the city (with a fourth in the works, despite the pandemic).
“Black people need to know that there's more than what they see around them,” he said. “The narrative around the United States is that people of color can't get money, can't find success. It makes it hard for people to want to try.”
Isaac has also represented his community by joining the Black Lives Matter protests, speaking out about his decision to the local media. “We're angry but deeper than that – we're scared,” he told a reporter who visited his Yogurtini shop on Main Street south of the Plaza. “This is not a game to us. It's not a joke. It's spirit‐crushing.”2
Isaac embraced his role as a community leader. When he looked out at that room full of kids at Superhero Yoga, he knew what a lot of them were living with at home because he had lived with it, too. His parents were hustlers. “Scrappy as hell,” as he described it. But for them, part of being scrappy was selling drugs to make ends meet. Both eventually turned their lives around after Isaac was born. Isaac's father became the second Black prison warden in Missouri, and the first without a college degree. His mother became a nurse.
Often, the message Isaac preached to kids was about taking themselves seriously. He'd done just that – writing a business plan at Missouri Western State University, where he attended college, and in so doing, winning a chance in 2012 to buy a Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory store in partnership with Steve Craig. Craig had a real estate business, owning at one point 13 outlet centers in seven states, and had become a huge donor to Missouri Western.3 One of the projects he settled on was helping business students at the school that bears his name become their own bosses.
With the help of Craig, Isaac bought the store for $104,000, paid off the debt, and sold it for $300,000. He used the money to get Yogurtini franchises started in Kansas City. He now employs 36 people across his businesses.
Isaac is a role model, a leader, and a successful businessman. Moreover, he loves what he does, creating a place where people gather, where they're served well, and where children delight in putting one of 65 toppings on their Yogurt. For kids, these are gummi worm, maraschino cherry, marshmallow bowls of heaven. He runs a “Books for Yo” program, where kids receive free yogurt for reading.
His work brings him a significant amount of joy. But there are headaches, too: bookkeeping and management, cash flow, and the seasonal ups and downs of running a business whose product is more popular during the summer months. But the good days far outnumber the bad ones, he tells us. “The key to my business is the key to every business. You need to have a good product, but ultimately it needs to be about more. So we are hyper‐local in the area of each store. We invest in the community. We have a big emphasis on customer service, on keeping the stores clean, on providing friendly service like opening the door for our customers. We welcome them and treat them like we appreciate them.”
Entrepreneurs like Isaac dream big. Big dreams don't necessarily mean size and scale, although Isaac certainly has growth in his sights. But impact is as important to entrepreneurs like Isaac: their role in their communities and their ability to impact the lives of others around them. New Builders dream of an idea, passion, or cause and then set out to create a business that reflects this ambition. Often, the role they will play in their community is an integral part of their dream.
Entrepreneurial Dreams
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