Small Business, Big Impact Strategies for Capitalizing on Sustainability

According to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), as of 2006, there were over 30 million small businesses in the United States (Cole, 2013). Although privately held small businesses produced more than 50% of the nonfarm private gross domestic product (GDP) and generated nearly two-thirds of the net job growth over the past 15 years, much of what scholars know about small business capitalization challenges is limited to data from large corporations such as banks and lending institutions (Cole, 2013). While some small businesses experience capital-related constraints in the form of overdependence on bank loans, credit constraints, or the inability to monetize equity, other small businesses fare better (Cheng, Ioannou, & Serafeim, 2014).