Entrepreneur: America is in peril if we don’t get more entrepreneurs

Tra Williams is an entrepreneur’s entrepreneur, a creative, resourceful and sometimes impatient businessman who has run everything from a personal training referral business to Dairy Queens to a trucking school. 

Some of this could be traced back to his childhood. He grew up in Blackshear — a no-stoplight small town in Southeast Georgia, where his mom was a rural letter carrier for the U.S. Post office. The Williams family also had a roadside business of sorts, selling homemade ceramics and excess vegetables from the farm at tables in the grass. “I thought everybody just hustled,” says Williams, a third whose nickname sounds like tray. “I thought that’s what everybody did.”

About 80 miles north of Jacksonville, Blackshear, says Williams, is the kind of place where just about everyone did one of three things: farming, work on the railroad or work in the local timber factory. “There weren’t any jobs,” he says. “There was nobody with a sign that said ‘now hiring.’