The United States Small Business Administration (SBA) defines a small business as employing less than 500 people.¹⁰ However, the SBA definition produces a sizeable discrepancy in what most would classify as a small business. In our conversations with Black Atlanta business owners, small businesses were thought of as local businesses that hired a handful of employees and provided valued services within their neighborhoods, often referred to by researchers as microbusinesses. This community definition is most in line with our findings that the vast majority — 97 percent — of Black businesses in the City of Atlanta have only one employee.¹¹ To that end, we focus on much smaller businesses in our dataset, given their dominant representation in Atlanta’s local economy, and redefine small Black-owned businesses as businesses that have less than 20 employees.¹²