Skip NavigationDavid Judson, Starr Hutchings Purdue, Ric Serrano and Adam Brand are all multi-generational owners of small businesses across the U.S.Alisa Stern | CNBC Make It | Courtesy Judson Studios, Starr Hutchings Purdue, Serrano’s Mexican Restaurant
When Starr Hutchings Purdue’s great-grandfather opened a funeral home in Macon, Georgia, in 1910, undertaking was a reliable way for Black Americans to make a living. Even the deceased were segregated.
Owning a business enabled independence and freedom, says Purdue, 69: “You weren’t relying on somebody else to provide your livelihood.” Her parents carried on Hutchings Funeral Home and were successful enough to put Purdue and her five siblings through college, she says.
Purdue now co-runs it with her sister Sharon Hutchings, but through the decades, the funeral industry has grown more competitive and expensive. It no longer provides the same kind of upward financial mobility afforded to the family’s past generations, Purdue says: “We monitor our expenses more closely and only splurge when we really have to.”
For the first time in generations, a wide array of U.S. small-business owners are struggling to do better than their parents, says Dan Wadhwani, an entrepreneurship professor at the University of Southern California Marshall School of Business. Some business owners like Purdue — whose family-owned business has passed through the hands of multiple generations — say they literally have the receipts to show it.
The shift is significant: Entrepreneurship is a classic vehicle for the American Dream, sewn into the country’s cultural fabric over the last 250 years as a difficult-yet-rewarding path to upward socioeconomic mobility. For a lot of families, it’s worked. Most American cities and plenty of towns have at least a handful of family-owned businesses that are over 100 years old. They’ve survived times of wars, economic downturns and massive social and cultural shifts, and enabled their owners’ families to make a living while maintaining their parents’ legacies.
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As recently as 2021, more than a quarter of all U.S. firms were family-owned businesses, according to data published by the Small Business Administration in April 2024. Many are multi-generational: Nearly a third of active family businesses have passed “full or controlling ownership” to their next generation, according to a survey of 730 family business and office executives conducted in early 2025 by advocacy group Family Enterprise USA.
But today, some Main Street-style business’ owners struggle for upward mobility in a way that previous generations never did, they say. And while those who inherited successful companies — and worked to evolve them — may own homes and cars, and can help put their kids through college, it’s harder even for them to ascend their parents’ station.
‘The American Dream has kind of become fragmented’
Part of the problem for some small-business owners is that their companies’ success doesn’t grow their personal finances as much as it used to, they say.
M&S Schmalberg, a 110-year-old custom fabric flower company in New York City’s garment district, is in a boom period, says vice president and fourth generation co-owner Adam Brand. The business was born from a classic American Dream story: Brand’s great-great uncles Morris and Sam Schmalberg emigrated from Poland and started the flower shop in 1916, establishing enough of a home for Brand’s grandfather Harold Brand to move to the U.S. — into Sam Schmalberg’s attic, specifically — after surviving a World War II concentration camp.
Today, its flowers appear on Met Gala red carpets and in TV shows like HBO’s “Sex and The City” and Netflix’s “Bridgerton.” Its a-la-carte flower sales jumped during the Covid-19 pandemic, and the company has turned a “modest profit” for three consecutive years, says Brand, 42. “If business stayed like this for the rest of my life, I’d be very happy,” he says.
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Yet Brand’s house on Long Island is smaller than the home he grew up in, just a 15-minute drive away, he says. He makes at least as much money annually than his dad did, but the income simply doesn’t go as far as it used to anymore, he estimates. The same is true for the business, says his dad, Warren Brand: Rent at M&S Schmalberg’s factory is roughly $15,000 per month, up from $420 per month in 1965, or approximately $4,500 in today’s dollars when adjusted for inflation.
The Brands aren’t alone. Small-business owners of all kinds — not just owners of family-run businesses — are struggling to keep up with rising costs, says Wadhwani. He cites inflationary pressures, economic uncertainty for large swaths of customers and a bevy of oversaturated industries as reasons why.
Those barriers to entry can stymie business proliferation and growth. While some business owners with access to generational wealth or Silicon Valley investment can still flourish, other less-flush small businesses and would-be entrepreneurs may get crowded out, Wadhwani notes. Without socioeconomic mobility, “the American Dream has kind of become fragmented,” he says.
The difficulties of modern-day upward mobility
Ric Serrano’s family business has navigated myriad challenges cited by Wadhwani over the years. Serrano’s Mexican Restaurant — a restaurant chain in Arizona — was founded in 1919 as a dry goods store by his grandfather and great-uncle, immigrants who’d fled the Mexican Revolution. It later morphed into a department store and, after it got “squeezed out” by chains like Macy’s and Dillard’s in the 1970s, turned into restaurants, says Serrano.
Each owner of the business grew the family’s finances, enabling them to live a better life than their parents did, until Serrano himself, he says: His family’s personal finances and lifestyle feel similar to when he was growing up. The restaurant chain has two locations, down from its peak of eight in the late 1990s and early 2000s, he says.
Though Arizona’s rising minimum wage — $15.50, up from $6.75 in 2007 — lags behind the rate of inflation over the same time period, Serrano says its annual increases make it “extremely difficult to remain profitable.” Many people are cutting back on dining out and groceries to stay on budget, with more than half of Americans saying their lives have become less affordable in the last year, according to a CNBC and SurveyMonkey Quarterly Money Survey published on April 9.
“You have to be ultra-successful in order to make it in the restaurant business today,” says Serrano, 65. “The atmosphere has taken us out of growth mode,” he adds.
David Judson, the fifth-generation head of Los Angeles-based Judson Studios, says he’s living a better life than his father did.Courtesy of David Judson
Socioeconomic mobility is generally getting more difficult to achieve, according to Opportunity Insights, a research and policy institute at Harvard University. Ninety percent of U.S. children born in 1940 earned more than their parents in adulthood, compared to half of modern-day children, the institute’s research found.
Half is still a significant figure, and indeed, some current family-business owners have successfully outpaced their parents. David Judson, the fifth-generation head of Los Angeles-based stained-glass studio Judson Studios, expanded his family’s business into contemporary art — a glass portrait of Kobe Bryant, for example — and public partnerships, including one with Seattle’s public transit system, he says. Those projects are a far cry from the church windows and Frank Lloyd Wright homes the company used to rely on for revenue, he notes.
He evolved the business’ tax structures to help save money, and now prioritizes investments instead of worrying about expenses, he says. “There were times where father struggled to meet payroll,” says Judson, 57. “We’re building now, as opposed to keeping up.”
It helps that stained glass is a niche, he adds: A large conglomerate is unlikely to step in and take his business. “We’re never going to be a massive financial company, but feeling like I have control over my own life is really important to me,” Judson says.
The cultural importance of American ‘hopefulness’
Running your own business remains a viable way to have agency over your career and finances. But the less it helps people attain socioeconomic mobility, the more the validity of the American Dream itself fades, says Wadhwani.
“I think social mobility is always important for a culture and a society, because people want to live for more than today,” he says. “A big part of American culture has been that hopefulness, that sense that ‘I will make a better future for me and my kids’ … It is one of those things that held us together culturally, as Americans, because we all felt like that could be something we shared.”
Of course, you don’t always need to compare yourself to your parents or grandparents, especially if you’re content with what you have. Brand, the M&S Schmalberg co-owner, notes that he’s still a homeowner with a young family in one of the country’s most expensive states. His goal for the company is to preserve his family legacy, boost American manufacturing and find new ways to get fabric flowers out into the world, he says.
William Pope Hutchings, founder Charles Henry Hutchings I, an unidentified man and Charles Henry Hutchings II standing outside the Hutchings Funeral Home in Macon, Georgia, shortly after its opening in 1910. The business today is located less than a block away.Courtesy of Starr Hutchings Purdue
Purdue — who co-runs Hutchings Funeral Home — says she willingly sacrificed higher pay and more career stability from her former job as a corporate accountant to rejoin her family business at age 40. At 50 hours per week, “the hours are long,” but she can take time off for vacations or family doctor’s appointments without fearing how it’ll impact her career, she says.
“When you look at working for someone else or working for yourself, you start to appreciate the benefits of working for yourself, working in a family business,” says Purdue. “You have much more flexibility and you’re invested in [its success].”
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