At the Greater Buffalo Small Business Development Center, Harbol helps business owners navigate difficult decisions. Through programs at Buffalo State and a summer farmers market, she is introducing the next generation to the possibilities of building something of their own.
There is something wonderful about watching a third grader try to sell something to a stranger for the first time.
At first, the child might be nervous. Before long, though, the nerves give way to enthusiasm, and the young entrepreneur is calling out to passersby, eager to show someone what they have made.
For Olivia Harbol, who coordinates the KidBiz program at the Greater Buffalo Small Business Development Center (GBSBDC), these moments are among the most rewarding parts of her work. Give children the opportunity to try something for themselves, and you may be surprised by what they discover.
KidBiz allows students in grades three through six to create products, set prices, and sell their goods at the Elmwood-Bidwell Farmers Market during the summer. In 2026, more than 100 young entrepreneurs participated, generating over $16,000 in sales.
Harbol sees more than a successful market season. Children who might never have imagined themselves selling a product learn to approach strangers, explain their ideas, negotiate trades, and discover that their creativity has value.
“They are so free to chat with one another,” she says. Children trade their goods and build a small economy of their own. One might exchange slime for a pin. Another might find a customer by simply calling out, “Come over here!”
Adults, she observes, often become preoccupied with what could go wrong. Children are more likely to try.
Harbol believes entrepreneurship has no age requirement. As a Certified Business Advisor at the GBSBDC, she works with more than 200 clients, from people exploring their first business idea to established owners trying to navigate their next challenge. She also onboards an average of 20 new clients each month, helping them develop business plans and make informed decisions about their futures.
The settings may differ, but her purpose remains consistent: help people understand their options and give them the confidence to decide what comes next.
Helping the next generation find its footing
From 2023 through 2026, Harbol coordinated the Bengal Entrepreneurship Program at Buffalo State University, mentoring students preparing pitches for the New York Business Plan Competition. For three consecutive years, Buffalo State students earned places among the competition’s top 60 students statewide.
She also planned and executed the Bengal Entrepreneurship Competition, where students pitched their business ideas for a share of a $5,000 prize pool.
These competitions ask students to do more than come up with a clever idea. They must explain what they want to build and make a convincing case for how their business could work.
For a student who has never pitched a business before, that experience can change how they see themselves. An idea that once existed only in a notebook becomes something they can explain and develop.
Harbol appreciates the confidence that grows through these experiences. With adult clients, she may not see the moment when a plan becomes reality. Someone might leave a meeting with a new direction and return weeks later having made a difficult decision or taken a meaningful step toward opening a business.
“I am the cheerleader in the background,” she says.
The accomplishment, however, belongs to the person doing the work.
Knowing when not to start a business
Entrepreneurship has its familiar success stories: the leap of faith, the grand opening, the small company that grows into something much larger. Harbol sees the less glamorous side, too. Someone might dream of opening a restaurant without fully considering the early mornings, inventory, staffing, and daily responsibilities. Another person might want a storefront when what they really want is to bake cookies, meet people, and sell at a farmers market. Those are two very different businesses. Recognizing the difference can save someone considerable time, money, and disappointment.
“If you do not have a safety net for yourself, now is not the time,” Harbol says.
She considers it a success when a client avoids a costly mistake, even if that means deciding against opening a business. A person who initially imagined a restaurant might discover that a small market stand offers the creative freedom and human connection they were looking for all along.
Harbol’s advising work involves plenty of practical questions, but it also requires listening. As she gets to know her clients, she learns when they need concrete guidance and when they simply need a place to talk through a problem they cannot comfortably discuss with family, friends, or competitors. She sometimes asks whether they need an action plan or just a chance to get something off their chest. Business owners spend so much time making decisions for employees, customers, and companies that they can have few places to acknowledge their own uncertainty.
Harbol tries to help people arrive at their own answers rather than prescribe a course of action. That might mean encouraging someone to pursue an idea or helping them recognize that they need more time.
Progress builds through practice. Confidence matters, but so does preparation.
Her advice is to break large ambitions into smaller steps. A business owner hoping to increase production might begin by tracking how many products they can make in an hour, then work toward improving that number. Someone looking for more sales can set a reasonable target and learn from the results.
What Buffalo’s brewing history can teach us
Harbol’s interest in how businesses adapt extends into her academic work. After returning to school and completing her master’s degree in history, she wrote a thesis examining Buffalo’s brewing entrepreneurs and how they responded to fires, Prohibition, local competition, and the arrival of national brands.
The subject was an unexpected choice for someone who admits she does not particularly love beer. Her interest began with the sheer scale of Buffalo’s historic brewing industry. During the nineteenth century, the city had a remarkable concentration of breweries. Studying them offered a way to understand how ordinary business decisions and economic pressures helped shape the city.
Harbol had initially considered writing about graham crackers. When that idea did not develop into a workable thesis, she returned to a research paper she had written about Buffalo breweries. She wanted to understand how business owners adapted when the conditions that sustained their livelihoods began to change. Rather than concentrating on bootlegging and smuggling during Prohibition, she focused on how brewery owners responded to upheaval and tried to keep their businesses alive. Some shifted into other lines of work, including milk production and real estate. Their stories revealed the practical decisions that can determine whether a business survives a period of uncertainty.
The parallels with contemporary small businesses were hard to miss. During the COVID-19 pandemic, owners had to adapt quickly to circumstances few could have anticipated.
For Harbol, the historical record also shows how much economic history is shaped by everyday decisions. What people buy, where they shop, and which businesses they support all help determine what remains.
Her interest in food history follows a similar path. She has explored subjects ranging from the food sailors consumed during the era of British naval commander Horatio Nelson to the cultural influences that shape Indian cuisine. A meal can reveal migration, trade, cultural exchange, and the ingenuity of people working with what is available to them.
People have always had to respond to circumstances they did not choose and find ways to keep going.
For someone who spends her professional life helping businesses find their footing, these stories offer a longer view of the same challenge.
Finding a place in Buffalo
Harbol grew up in Macedon, where life moved at a different pace, before moving to Buffalo for college. After two years in the dorms, she moved into her own apartment and discovered a city that offered more opportunities to explore on her own. She could visit a farmers market, try a restaurant, or spend time in a park without needing a car for every outing. She has stayed because there is always something to discover.
When people complain that there is nothing to do in Buffalo, Harbol thinks they may need to look a little harder. Sometimes that means walking a mile or two, exploring a neighborhood, or trying a restaurant they have never visited. She is especially enthusiastic about the region’s food scene, which she sees as far more diverse than its best-known culinary export suggests.
Buffalo is famous for chicken wings, but Harbol points to the many other traditions represented across its neighborhoods. She mentions Tangos 716 for Argentine food and Pinoy Boi for Filipino fare downtown. She appreciates discovering food traditions that are unfamiliar to her and supporting people who share their culture with the community. A dish someone grew up eating can find an appreciative audience among people who have never encountered it before. Food becomes a point of connection.
That interest informs how she thinks about small businesses, too. A restaurant is a livelihood, but it can also express family history and the desire to share something meaningful with others.
The farmers market offers a similar kind of connection. A child selling handmade goods and an established vendor preparing food become part of the same public life. People come to buy things, but they also come to talk, discover, and spend time among their neighbors.
A rower’s perspective
Harbol’s own life has been shaped by setting goals and discovering what she can accomplish through practice.
At Buffalo State, she was a member of the university’s first women’s rowing club. In 2019, the team placed third in the Novice Women’s 4+ at the Head of the Schuylkill in Philadelphia. She also served on the club’s executive board, helping ensure compliance with campus student-government requirements, and assisted with coaching during the 2024–25 academic year. Rowing demands individual effort, but success depends on coordination, discipline, and trust. Everyone has a role to play.
Harbol also competed in racewalking as a young person, setting a school record and qualifying for national competition. Breaking the eight-minute mark was a memorable achievement because it meant passing a threshold she had once considered difficult to reach.
More recently, she returned to running and completed the Buffalo Marathon after previously running a half marathon.
“You are always a little bit more capable,” she says.
She has carried that lesson into other parts of her life. Through rowing, she came to appreciate how accessible Buffalo’s waterways can be, particularly around the Black Rock Canal. She has even taught her boss, who was over 50, how to row. People do not have to reach a particular age before trying something new, she believes. There is always room to begin.
Harbol also recognizes how easily the prospect of failure can interfere with a decision. She describes an inner tendency to play devil’s advocate, imagining everything that could go wrong until the possibilities become paralyzing. She is learning to recognize when that instinct helps her think carefully and when it keeps her from making a choice. It is an uncertainty she understands in the people she advises. Having an idea does not automatically make the next step easy. Her work gives people room to examine their fears without letting those fears make every decision.
The work of helping people find their own answers
Harbol’s inclination to help others reaches back to her childhood.
When she was young, her father Ernie became ill with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS. He died in 2008, leaving Harbol and her brother in the care of their mother Abbé , who returned to school to pursue the credentials she needed to teach.
Harbol remembers the slow progression of her father’s illness, the oxygen tank, and the way her mother kept the family moving through a period of profound change. After her father’s death, Harbol returned to school the following Monday. At the time, she did not fully understand what had happened. She remembers moving through the school day while other children talked about the loss. Ordinary life continued even though something fundamental had changed. Her mother had two young children to raise. She went back to school, began teaching, and eventually coached a cross-country team. Harbol watched her build a life through the difficult work of continuing forward.
Looking back, she recognizes the influence of that example. Grief does not simply disappear. People find ways to keep participating in life while carrying what has happened.
Harbol describes herself as a helper at her core. Volunteering matters to her, as does being the person a friend can call when they need to talk through a difficult situation.
That instinct takes different forms across her work. With a business owner, it might mean helping someone see that a storefront is unnecessary. With a college student, it might mean helping an ambitious idea become a workable plan. With a child at a farmers market, it might mean creating enough room for a nervous young seller to discover the excitement of making a sale.
She does not need to make the decision for someone else. She wants them to have the confidence and information to make it themselves.
Outside work, Harbol loves trying restaurants, exploring different cuisines, and cooking at home. Her ideal menu would be long and varied, with fresh spring rolls, crab rangoons, butter chicken, Thai beef salad, chocolate cake, and ice cream. She laughs at how many options she would want. That appetite for variety feels fitting for someone whose work spans business advising, history, athletics, and youth mentorship.
For some people, success means finding the courage to start a business. For others, it means recognizing that the business they imagined is not the one they want to run. For a college student, it might begin with standing before a panel and making the case for an idea. For a child at a market table, it begins with calling out to a stranger and discovering that someone is interested in what they have made.
That may be the most important part of her work: helping people recognize their own capacity to begin.
At the GBSBDC Harbol helps people turn possibilities into plans. Through Buffalo State and KidBiz, she gives younger people opportunities to discover what they can do. She can offer guidance and a place to think through the risks. The next step belongs to the person in front of her.
George Cassidy Payne is a journalist, poet, essayist, and crisis counselor based in Rochester, New York. His writing explores the people and acts of care that shape communities. He is the founder of The Loom: Experiments in Collaborative Storycrafting, an ongoing interview project featuring conversations with educators, artists, scientists, advocates, social workers, and other people whose work offers a deeper look at the world around us.