WILMINGTON — Michelle Harris likes to keep people at the forefront of her work. In fact, with small businesses employing roughly 227,000 jobs in Delaware, she’s focused on lending as much help as she can as the head of the U.S. Small Business Administration office for the state.
“Every time I go out, I never know what story I’m going to hear from a business owner. It just reiterates to me, why this office is important,” Harris told the Delaware Business Times. “I always have a civil servant approach to my work, and it really frames into mind how to help these small businesses tap into the resources we have.”
For about 30 years, Harris has spent her career in public service, starting as a seasonal clerk with the IRS and later working with the Delaware Office of Supplier Diversity and the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Office of Small and Disadvantaged Business Utilization. Over that time, she found plenty of stories on how public programs have made a difference.
For example, when she offered tax counseling for the elderly through the IRS, she helped a woman file a tax return after three years of not filing.
“She was afraid and she ended up getting more than $10,000 back. She cried in my office, because she thought that she was in danger of getting things repossessed,” Harris said. “That really made me realize that what I’m doing was worth it.”
Her time at the IRS volunteer income tax assistance program also opened her eyes to see what small business owners were up against. The program was in a shared space that offered financial literacy to budding entrepreneurs and other programs.
“I started to see a lot of people who had a main job and a side hustle they hoped to turn into an actual business. I started to research about other resources available, and it really showed there was a group of people who had this disconnect on access to these resources,” she said.
Harris also said Hurricane Katrina which devastated New Orleans and forced thousands to relocate. In her final role at the IRS, after 23 years and working her way up into at least 10 other positions, she worked with people on disaster assistance.
“That really caused a lot of people to rethink how federal and state agencies respond in disasters,” she said. “And many small businesses didn’t have a business plan on how to operate in an emergency. That really said to me, this is where I want to get into to help people.”
The success stories over the years helped make the early years of her career worth the trouble. Harris describes herself as ambitious, but stayed in one federal agency for years because, at the time, it made best sense for her husband and her young son.
But after the IRS, she started to branch out into more business-related assistance agencies, including coordinating contracting opportunities through the state’s Office of Supplier Diversity in 2012.
Reflecting on her time there and the more recent conversation about opening opportunities for minority-owned businesses, Harris said that it really shined a light on how to best get the word out. That became even more apparent as minority-owned businesses lacked the opportunity for the Paycheck Protection Program.
“I do feel like the best way to provide the information is to understand how the community works, and that’s how the Community Navigator program was born. It’s a hub program that has an arm in every community and provides that connection to SBA,” she told DBT.
Then Harris took a job with the United States Department of Transportation and started commuting four hours every work day in what she nicknamed “the D.C. Boogie.” That dance lasted seven years.
“When COVID-19 happened, it really made me assess what I was doing. It gets to the point where you keep moving, you’re not really thinking about the big picture. That did give me the time to access what I wanted from my career at the time,” she said.
Now, as the chief of the Delaware District of the SBA, Harris oversees a complex network of programs focused on entrepreneurial development and opportunities. That includes counseling programs on business plans and market research, the loan guarantee programs, while working as the bridge between federal agencies and small businesses for contracting needs, disaster relief loans and more.
“I have a strong team that already excels. But I like to give people the space to create their careers. I think about my own journey in that way, because there were times I couldn’t move in my career because I was put on a shelf,” she said.
At this stage in her career, Harris is considering what she wants to achieve in what could be her last act. With some of her own struggles in mind – and the stories she’s heard over the years – she still wants to break down barriers amongst the Black community and people of color when it comes to career and capital opportunities.
“Sometimes, I’m still the only person of color in the room and that speaks to me,” she told DBT. “That unevenness of access is still there today. I had a gentleman share with me that he applied for a $100,000 loan through a bank and he was offered $50,000. His partner, who was a white man, used the same information and he was offered $100,000. We’re still having those discussions with our lenders and out in the community.”
But even on the tough days still to come, the stories still strengthen her resolve.
Recently, Harris met with a young man who worked as a cook at a diner in the 1990s. When the diner owner was getting ready to retire, the employee wasn’t sure what he would do for a living. The two were able to strike a deal – the employee bought the diner.
“Now, he doesn’t have to worry about his job, he owns a business. He never saw that for himself,” she said. “That’s just one of the interactions I have all the time and I’m just so grateful I can work for an agency that makes things like that happen.”
