DreamSpring publishes first book on small business grit and growth

By AI, Created 10:35 AM UTC, May 20, 2026, /AGP/ – DreamSpring has released its first book, Grit and Growth, with Wiley to turn 30 years of lending and founder support into a practical guide for small business owners. The book combines lessons from DreamSpring leaders and dozens of borrower interviews, and it is now available through major booksellers.

Why it matters: - DreamSpring is packaging three decades of founder experience into a book aimed at helping small business owners handle the hardest parts of entrepreneurship, not just the funding side. - The book is designed to support founders from startup through growth and exit planning, which makes it relevant beyond the earliest stages of business building. - The release adds a new educational product for nonprofits, small business leaders, and entrepreneurship programs that want more practical founder training.

What happened: - DreamSpring announced the release of Grit and Growth: Candid Stories and Lessons for Building a Small Business with Purpose on May 12, 2026. - Wiley published the book, which is the first book in DreamSpring’s history. - Anne Haines, DreamSpring’s founder and former president and CEO, co-authored the book with Senior Communications Specialist Laura Marrich and Chief Engagement Officer Amber Kani. - DreamSpring is a nonprofit Community Development Financial Institution and U.S. Small Business Administration lender based in Albuquerque, New Mexico. - The book is available now through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, BookShop.org and Target.

The details: - The book draws on Haines’s 32-year entrepreneurial journey of founding, scaling and stepping away from DreamSpring. - The authors also used dozens of hours of interviews with small business owners served by DreamSpring at multiple stages, from startup to growth to exit planning. - Featured voices include a Pueblo potter whose work hangs in the Smithsonian, an award-winning tabletop game publisher and the founder of a barber and beauty academy that has graduated nearly 1,000 students. - Each chapter combines those stories with practical how-tos and myth-busting aimed at common assumptions about entrepreneurship. - The book covers isolation, self-doubt, pivots, burnout, recovery from crisis and the successes that keep founders going. - The content is written for small business owners, nonprofit leaders and aspiring entrepreneurs. - Organizations can contact Amber Kani at akani@dreamspring.org about bringing the book’s curriculum to teams through interactive leadership sessions led by the DreamSpring team.

Between the lines: - DreamSpring is positioning the book as a field guide built from lived experience, not a generic business manual. - The emphasis on emotional strain suggests the market for small business advice is expanding beyond finance and operations into founder resilience and decision-making. - Endorsements from Ann Rhoades of JetBlue Airlines and Joyce Klein of The Aspen Institute signal that DreamSpring wants the book to land as a serious entrepreneurship resource, not just a memoir.

What’s next: - DreamSpring is likely to use the book as a platform for curriculum-based training and leadership sessions with organizations. - The book’s reach may grow through distribution at major retailers and through founder and nonprofit networks. - DreamSpring could extend the book’s lessons into future programming if demand for the curriculum model grows.

The bottom line: - DreamSpring is turning its lending experience into a broader playbook for founder resilience, business growth and purposeful exit planning.