Amish Businesses Beyond the Farm with Dr. Steven Nolt

What makes Amish Businesses so successful? Why have Amish communities left farming for other businesses? And how did Amish entrepreneurs get started in woodworking? For help answering these questions, we turned to Dr. Steven Nolt of the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania.

The Amish have a long history of entrepreneurial pursuits, but it wasn't until the 1980s that they started to leave farming behind and focus on alternative businesses. But now the failure rate of Amish businesses in their first 5 years is just 10% compared to 50% among small business startups nationally! Listen to the full episode to understand what makes Amish businesses so successful.

Some of the books Nolt has written include “A History of the Amish,” which is in its third edition, and “The Amish: A Concise Introduction.” He notably co-authored “Amish Grace: How Forgiveness Transcended Tragedy” about the Amish schoolhouse shooting in the village of Nickel Mines in Lancaster County. A few other co-authorships include the books, “Amish Micro-Enterprises: Models for Rural Development,” “Amish Enterprise: From Plows to Profits,” and a paper titled “Amish Enterprise: The Collective Power of Ethnic Entrepreneurship” that appeared in the Global Business and Economics Review.

More Resources:

Learn more about the American Amish population at http://groups.etown.edu/amishstudies/

Dr. Nolt also recommends the publication Plain Communities Business Exchange for a glimpse at the Amish business world. Subscribe or learn more at https://www.plaincommunities.com/

For more reading on the topic, check out Erik Wesner's book Success Made Simple: An Inside Look at Why Amish Businesses Thrive: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/success-made-simple-erik-wesner/1100298464

Or the paper Amish enterprise: the collective power of ethnic entrepreneurship, by Donald Kraybill, Steven Nolt, and Erik Wesner in 2010: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/5f83/f08e613d01d64378e142537a58e77e0e8f41.pdf

This podcast is brought to you by DutchCrafters: https://www.dutchcrafters.com/