There has been a noticeable expansion in the different communities throughout North Dakota and Minnesota in recent years. Downtown areas are being revamped in cities like West Fargo and Moorhead to try and draw more customers to the many businesses that occupy the areas. This shift has occurred because entrepreneurship as a career path is on the rise and more people are starting their own businesses.
According to Upwork, a company that conducts annual reports on different aspects of business, 60 million Americans worked freelance in 2022. That’s 39 percent of the United States workforce. Freelance work is exciting because a person is able to work at different companies and have more freedom instead of being permanently employed by a single company.
Tiffany Ford, the state director of North Dakota Small Business Development Center, started noticing this change after the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We served just over 1,000 clients in our state in 2019. In 2023 we served almost 1,800,” Ford said.
Around that time, Ford remembers that many oil field workers lost their jobs with large corporations pulling out of western North Dakota. To recover, workers ended up opening their own oil field services and were able to fill the demand left behind.
She’s not alone in this observation. Ian Carlstrom, the regional director of West Central Minnesota Small Business Development Center, agrees that the pandemic has, at least in part, fueled this uptick in small businesses.
“In many cases, they (business owners) don’t want to build a huge empire or even employ many people, they just want an alternative career path that’s satisfying where they can be their own boss,” Carlstrom said.
However, there are drawbacks to being your own boss and being an entrepreneur.
Allen and Dawn Pritchard owned All Season Motorsports in West Fargo for 21 years before selling the business in 2023. Two decades of running a business together has given the married couple knowledge on the benefits and the less exciting aspects of being an entrepreneur.
For the first seven years, Allen was the only one running All Season Motorsports; it started out as a lawn care and snowmobile repair shop and grew into a golf cart dealership. In 2009, the business took off and was growing out of control, so Dawn came on to help Allen manage everything.
“It became a monster, and I couldn’t do everything myself,” Allen said.
In the early stages of ownership, the Pritchards were running their business out of their garage, and one of the hardest things was to keep standard business hours. When the business was running out of their house, people would stop by asking for repairs on the weekends.
One of the things that affected Dawn the most was her husband’s absence from home. He was constantly working 70-80 hours a week and missed out on time with his family.
“Everyone thinks that when you run a business you can do whatever you want whenever you want,” Dawn said. “But it really turns into another child that throws the biggest tantrums. Your business doesn’t stop being your business at 6 o’clock when everyone else clocks out.”
Carlstrom works with a variety of clients offering free consultations for their business endeavors. Some clients are start-ups looking for help with the first steps of running a business and some are already established and are looking for growth opportunities.
He has been involved with entrepreneurs for a long time, so the field isn’t new to him.
Carlstrom’s first job in high school revolved around entrepreneurship and was surrounded by different friends and family businesses. Carlstrom knew he never wanted to work for a large corporation because he would lose out on that feeling of closeness he had experienced growing up.
“One of the reasons I love this work is the vast diversity in our clients and their ideas that shape the world,” Carlstrom said. “One of the things we help our clients do is to build their network and develop their community because it can be lonely as an entrepreneur.”
While Ford works with entrepreneurs from large and small cities, all trying to make others’ lives enjoyable and curate a sense of belonging, she believes this sense of community is most strong in rural communities.
“Our smaller communities outnumber our large, populated communities. Those smaller towns depend on the small businesses that exist to provide essential goods and services to the residents,” Ford said.
They are vital to the town’s ability to function and provide for its residents.
There has also been a growth in larger businesses across the Fargo-Moorhead area. John Machacek, the chief innovation officer at Fargo Moorhead Economic Development, mostly works with scalable businesses in the area.
Machacek helps develop what he refers to as the ecosystem of the entrepreneurs he helps. The ecosystem includes the local community and other players that are beneficial to growing a business. Machacek tries to connect entrepreneurs to these different people and promote their work.
He also works with Emerging Prairie, the company that hosts StartupBrews on Wednesday mornings. Entrepreneurs from the Fargo-Moorhead community speak about their businesses and provide an opportunity for networking.
“One of the byproducts we didn’t anticipate was how it (StartupBREW) has fostered a sense of community pride. People feel like the Fargo-Moorhead area really kicks ass now,” Machacek said. “We dominate this entrepreneurship stuff.”
Machacek feels like the local community has embraced the appreciation for the creativity that comes along with entrepreneurship. Even if an idea ends up not working, the community is still present to support it.
One of the reasons Carlstrom believes the community is a driving force in entrepreneurship is because of propinquity. It’s a term many people haven’t heard of before, but it describes the relationship between proximity and repetition.
“The closer you are to someone and the longer you spend time with them, the more likely you are to have a relationship. It’s hard to build a relationship with someone you never see. That’s why there is stronger support in communities where you can get to know entrepreneurs on a deeper level,” he said.
Definitions: provided by Merriam-Webster Dictionary and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development
- entrepreneur: one who organizes, manages, and assumes the risks of a business or enterprise
- freelancer: a person who pursues a profession without a long-term commitment to any one employer
- scalable business: businesses looking to grow and expand on a larger level, potentially wanting to become a chain
- small business: an independently owned and operated business that is not dominant in its field of operation and conforms to standards set by the Small Business Administration or by state law regarding number of employees and yearly income (small = 10-49 employees, medium = 50-249 employees, large = 250+)
- start-up: a fledgling business enterprise