— ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Chris Scott

Former Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI) director, and management at the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA). Author of The Microbusiness Millionaire. The person who used to sit on the other side of the lending desk — and decided ordinary people deserved to know what he knew.

For years, my job was to decide who got to become a business owner.

As a loan officer and then director at a Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI), and later in management at the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA), I sat across the desk from ordinary people with an extraordinary amount of courage. Nurses. Plumbers. Operations managers. People with a steady paycheck and a quiet, stubborn feeling that there had to be more than trading their best hours for a salary that capped out.

Some of them walked out as owners. Some didn't. And over the years, I started to see the pattern — the difference between the people who built something real and the people who stayed stuck was almost never money, or genius, or luck. It was knowing the path. Knowing that boring, profitable businesses were for sale. Knowing that lenders existed who were built to say yes to first-timers. Knowing what to buy, how to fund it, and how to make it run without you.

The people who knew those things had a map. Everyone else was standing at the bottom of a cliff, staring up.

The Microbusiness Millionaire is the map I wish I could have handed every person who sat across from me. The lending years taught me what to look for; years of research against those criteria produced the fifty categories in the guide. No hype. No hustle-culture. No get-rich-quick. Just the path I watched work, over and over — turned into a story you can see yourself in, and a system you can actually follow.

<$350K

The kind of business this is about — reachable, not glamorous

4

Paths in: acquire, build, franchise, or side-hustle

$1M+

Portfolio enterprise value the method aims to build

Why "microbusiness"?

Because that's where the real, quiet wealth is — in the unglamorous Main Street businesses most people walk past every day. They don't make headlines. They make owners. And with community lenders and one repeatable system, they're within reach of far more people than anyone told you.

That's the whole mission: get the map into the hands of the people who were never given it.