Sanford meetup gives entrepreneurs a space to talk honestly

Entrepreneurs Anonymous gave Sanford business owners something many of them do not have often enough: a room where they could talk plainly about the strain of keeping a company alive. About 10 owners gathered at Christina Hollerbach’s office at Hollerbach With Purpose, 112 Sanford Ave., for the free monthly meetup, which ran First Wednesdays from 4:00 to 5:30 p.m. and began March 4.

The format was intentionally stripped down. The gathering was lightly moderated, built around open conversation and a short leadership takeaway, with coffee, tea and cookies on hand. It was not a pitch-deck event or a polished networking hour. The point was to let budding and current small business owners compare notes, ask for help and say out loud what is and is not working across different industries.

Hollerbach’s own path made the setting fit the message. Her website says she spent more than 15 years working her way from dishwasher to CEO of Hollerbach’s, while also taking on leadership roles with the Ritz Theater, Sanford Main Street, Downtown Sanford Rotary Club, Leadership Seminole and the Woman’s Club of Sanford. That kind of background matters in a room built around the realities of entrepreneurship, where cash flow, hiring and burnout can feel too personal to bring up at home.

In Seminole County, the need for that kind of peer support sits inside a larger economic squeeze. The county’s estimated population was 491,884 on July 1, 2025, with 206,563 housing units. Median gross rent was $1,783, and median monthly owner costs with a mortgage were $2,020. For many owners, those household numbers translate into the same pressure they face in business: limited margin, rising overhead and very little room for a bad month.

Local and national business data help explain why a small Sanford meetup can matter. Seminole County’s business resources pages point owners toward lenders, programs, boards, start-up guides and counseling. Main Street America said about one-third of respondents to its Spring 2026 small business survey described their business as a community gathering place or third space, and the organization said microbusinesses with fewer than 20 employees provide work to more than 21 million Americans. Its survey drew 2,421 responses from owners across all 50 states, Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Florida’s small-business economy is just as dependent on those operators. The U.S. Small Business Administration’s 2025 state profile for Florida said reporting banks issued $7.2 billion in 2023 loans to businesses with revenues of $1 million or less, and small businesses accounted for a net increase of 139,887 jobs, or 77.4% of the state’s total net job growth. In Sanford, the value of a room like this was not networking for its own sake. It was a small, practical defense against isolation.