Mayors and entrepreneurs should see each other as allies

Source: Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation

In cities and towns where city leaders and entrepreneurs work together, they create communities with vibrant local economies where startups and small businesses thrive.

Mayors are a lot like entrepreneurs. They have a demand they have to meet; limited resources to meet that demand; limited time to meet that demand – and everybody has a better idea about how they should do it. Or, I should say more precisely, everybody is critical of the way they're going about it, but nobody seems to have a better idea of how to do it.

Which is a lot like the entrepreneurial experience, right? You know, everybody's an armchair quarterback, but nobody's really there to help execute on the plan. Resources are often scarce and, then of course, things happen that change a plan on a daily basis.

That feeling can be very isolating, and it's what you hear from entrepreneurs, and it's what you hear from mayors.

Allies in creating conditions to thrive

There's a long causal chain between what a congressperson or a CEO of a large company decides to do and the people that feel it. That is not true for a mayor or an entrepreneur.

Kauffman's Evan Absher presented at the Mayors Conference on Entrepreneurship in Kansas City, 2019.

Entrepreneurs know their customers, they know their team, they're intimately involved. Same thing with the mayors. They know their team, they know their constituents, and they know their stakeholders. Just like entrepreneurs, they're going to hear from them, they're going to see them at the grocery store, they're going to see them in town – and that creates another like-set of pressures and dynamics. Mayors and entrepreneurs live with their choices, as essayist Nassim Talib would say – they have skin in the game.