What Endures
What the Numbers Cannot Measure About Building a Small Business
There is a particular kind of arithmetic that comes with building a small business.
Revenue. Expenses. Profit. Loss.
Eventually, years of work get reduced to numbers entered into boxes – numbers that can determine whether someone, somewhere, believes your business is ready, viable, worthy of investment.
The numbers tell the truth.
They do not always tell the whole story.
In 2024, Black Dolls Matter® was building momentum.
In 2025, our revenue fell dramatically.
Those two statements say nothing about what was happening around us – or what we were doing through it.
Our work has long been connected to the creative and entertainment industries. We navigated the effects of two back-to-back industry strikes, followed by broader economic pressure and a difficult holiday retail season. The ground shifted under every small business in our space.
And that economic pressure was not abstract.
Black women form the heart of the community Black Dolls Matter® was created to serve. In 2025, they faced a weakening labor market with particular force. Between January and August, employment among Black women fell by approximately 251,000 jobs. Although some of those losses recovered later in the year, December still ended with 113,000 fewer Black women employed than in January.
These are women in our community – mothers, grandmothers, aunties, collectors, educators, caregivers, cultural stewards, and champions of Black-owned businesses.
When their economic circumstances change, the businesses built to serve them feel it.
A lost paycheck becomes a household budget reconsidered. A household budget reconsidered becomes a purchase postponed. Those individual decisions ripple outward through the small businesses that depend on their communities to survive.
The ground shifted beneath our customers.
It shifted beneath us too.
So we responded.
We reevaluated. We recalibrated. We adjusted our business to meet the changing needs of our community.
And still, we kept building.
At the NYC Toy Fair, I met manufacturers from China who were eager to work with Black Dolls Matter®.
For a company whose products had largely come from limited, founder-led production, those conversations opened a door we had been working toward for years.
Scale.
We could begin thinking differently about what Black Dolls Matter® might become – a second production pathway that expanded our product line, reached more customers, opened wholesale opportunities, and put culturally affirming products into more hands, while preserving the handmade work at the heart of what we do.
The opportunity was real.
The relationships were real.
The demand was real.
What we lacked was sufficient capital to move.
That distinction matters more than most people outside of entrepreneurship understand.
Opportunity and capacity are not the same thing.
You can have the idea. You can have the experience. You can have the relationships. You can have manufacturers ready to work. You can have customers waiting for what comes next.
And still not have enough capital to cross the distance between possibility and production.
When the Numbers Go Down
There is a tendency to look at declining revenue and assume the business behind it must also be declining.
Sometimes that is true.
Sometimes a business does everything it can to remain standing while the conditions around it shift – and the numbers record the disruption, not the discipline.
We did not wait for conditions to improve.
We paid attention to what was happening around us and responded directly. We studied our community, adjusted our approach, and kept moving.
We remained in business. We continued creating. We continued serving. We continued preparing for what might come next.
That experience revealed something our systems for evaluating small businesses struggle to capture.
We measure growth well.
We measure endurance poorly.
A spreadsheet records that revenue declined. It cannot record the decisions made under pressure – the pivots, the recalibrations, the early mornings and late nights spent protecting something worth protecting.
It cannot measure the relationships being built before there is enough money to activate them.
It cannot measure the opportunity sitting just beyond the reach of available capital.
It cannot measure what it takes to carry an idea through a season when the marketplace itself is shifting beneath your feet.
Numbers capture what happened. They rarely capture what held – or what had to change so that something could.
Standing in the Room
Then came another moment.
A pitch competition for small businesses.
Once again, I stood in a room doing what entrepreneurs get asked to do over and over: explain the vision, demonstrate the opportunity, show the plan, and make the case for why investment now could change what happens next.
The request was modest – under $25,000.
The plan was concrete.
Behind that number sat a larger strategy: how Black Dolls Matter® could grow while remaining rooted in the community and mission that called it into existence.
Because Black Dolls Matter® has never simply been about selling dolls.
It is a cultural platform built around representation, creativity, memory, education, and community. Every doll carries a story. Every workshop plants something in a child that the marketplace did not plant there before. Every institutional partnership extends that mission into spaces where Black children deserve to see themselves reflected with dignity.
Standing in that pitch competition, I felt something sharpen inside me.
We were still pitching.
After the strikes.
After the difficult year.
After the revenue decline.
After searching for capital in a market that rewards growth and struggles to account for endurance.
We were still walking into rooms and saying:
Here is what we have built.
Here is where it can go.
Here is what becomes possible if someone invests in it.
There is endurance in that too.
The Capital Paradox
Small businesses face a strange and punishing paradox.
The message, spoken and unspoken, is often this:
Grow, and then we will invest in you.
Growth sometimes requires investment first.
A business can hold equipment, inventory, intellectual property, experience, community, manufacturing relationships, a recognizable brand, a clear plan, and a genuine market opportunity – and still find itself standing on one side of a financial threshold, watching the resources it needs sit on the other.
That gap hits hardest for a business coming through a challenging period.
The year a business most needs capital may become the very year whose financial results make capital hardest to obtain.
Sit with that.
A business experiences disruption. Revenue falls. Capital becomes more necessary. And because revenue fell, the business may no longer satisfy the financial threshold required to access the capital that could help it recover.
This cycle can trap real businesses with real potential. Financial results alone cannot tell us whether a business lacks vision, discipline, or merit.
Access to capital has never been experienced equally.
In a 2019 analysis of Small Business Credit Survey data, the Federal Reserve Board found that Black-owned businesses that applied for financing were 7 percent less likely to obtain credit overall than comparable white-owned firms – even after controlling for revenue size, credit score, profitability, location, firm age, industry, state, veteran and woman ownership, and employee size.
The researchers accounted for every measurable firm characteristic included in their analysis.
The gap remained.
The disparities were even larger at large and small banks.
That finding matters here precisely because of what the analysis controls for. This was not a comparison of businesses at different stages, with different revenues, or different credit profiles. These were comparable firms, measured against the same variables.
The gap that remained points to something the financial measures in that analysis could not explain.
It means the conversation about capital access cannot end with the numbers on a single financial statement. A difficult year tells us something about what happened to a business. It does not, by itself, tell us everything about that business’s potential – or about the conditions under which that business works to recover and grow.
The disruption arrives.
Revenue falls.
Capital becomes more necessary.
And the path to recovery financing narrows at precisely the moment a business needs it to widen.
Standards exist for good reasons. The conversation about what those standards measure – and what they miss – deserves a place in every room where funding decisions get made.
Endurance deserves a seat at that table.
What Endures?
So I have been sitting with a different measurement.
Not simply: How much did you make?
But: What endured?
The business endured.
The idea endured.
The relationships endured.
The knowledge endured.
The community endured.
The mission endured.
And perhaps most importantly:
The vision endured.
Endurance does not mean everything remained unchanged. The businesses that survive difficult seasons are the ones willing to look honestly at what is working, release what is not, and carry the mission forward in a form the moment can actually sustain.
We reevaluated.
We recalibrated.
We adjusted.
The mission remained intact even as we reconsidered how best to carry it forward.
Survival is not stagnation.
Sometimes survival is construction.
Sometimes you protect the foundation while reconsidering what needs to be built on top of it.
Sometimes the most important accomplishment of a difficult year is that a business still stands when the year ends – that the purpose, the people, and the possibility all made it through.
That is not a consolation prize.
That is the work.
The Opportunity Before Us
Today, Black Dolls Matter® has a growth opportunity in front of it.
I would be dishonest if I said that carries no weight.
The vision is clear. The belief in the products is deep. The picture of what we can build is vivid and specific.
What concerns me is practical.
The opportunity could arrive before the capital does.
Small businesses do not receive unlimited windows. Manufacturing relationships change. Markets shift. Consumer attention moves. Costs rise. People move on.
The right opportunity at the wrong financial moment can become the opportunity you spend years remembering – not with pride, but with the particular ache of knowing exactly what was possible and watching it pass.
That is why adequate funding matters – and why the timing of that funding matters as much as the amount.
Capital gives an entrepreneur the ability to act while the opportunity is still an opportunity.
It turns a conversation into a purchase order.
A prototype into inventory.
A relationship into a manufacturing partnership.
An audience into customers.
A vision into infrastructure.
Without it, the window closes.
With it, what was possible becomes real – and what was built through the hard years finally gets to grow.
Still Here
Entrepreneurship offers no guarantees about the outcome of any pitch, grant application, or funding request.
What these years have given me goes deeper than outcomes.
The numbers moved in the wrong direction, and we kept building. The marketplace changed, and we changed with it. Opportunities arrived before we were sufficiently capitalized to pursue them. Plans had to wait. Rooms asked us, once again, to explain why the work mattered.
And still, the vision endured.
For years, I believed one of the most important questions an entrepreneur could ask was:
What can we build?
A harder question comes first.
What can endure long enough to be built?
Black Dolls Matter® has answered that question more than once.
We are still here.
Still creating. Still making. Still imagining. Still listening. Still adjusting. Still looking toward the opportunity in front of us.
Endurance is knowing what must remain – and having the courage to change what must change. It carries the vision through the years when there is not enough, through the uncertainty, through the waiting, through the nights when the next chapter is not yet visible.
What endures becomes the foundation for what comes next.
We endured the night.
We are still here.
And the sun has risen.
Source Notes
Black women’s employment, 2025. Institute for Women’s Policy Research analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data. Employment among Black women declined by approximately 251,000 between January and August 2025. Although employment subsequently recovered in part, December 2025 ended with approximately 113,000 fewer Black women employed than in January.
Access to capital. Federal Reserve Board, Access to Financial Services Matters to Small Businesses (2019), analysis of the 2018 Small Business Credit Survey. After controlling for characteristics including revenue size, credit score, profitability, location, firm age, industry, state, veteran and woman ownership, and employee size, Black-owned businesses that applied for financing were 7 percent less likely to obtain credit overall than comparable white-owned firms. The analysis found larger disparities at large and small banks.
