Built by Texans, Freed by Policy: The Entrepreneurs Driving a New Era of Opportunity

Walk into Rosa Medina's bakery in San Antonio on a Saturday morning and you will find a line out the door. Her conchas, her pan dulce, her custom cakes for quinceañeras and weddings — they have made her a neighborhood institution. What you will not find is a government program that made it happen. What nearly derailed her, however, was one: a thicket of overlapping city permits, a state licensing requirement that applied to commercial kitchens operating above a certain square footage, and a compliance audit that cost her three weeks of revenue and two months of sleep.

"I almost quit before I really started," she says. "Not because the business wasn't working. Because the paperwork was drowning me."

Rosa's story is not unusual. It is, in fact, the defining experience of small business ownership in states that have allowed regulatory frameworks to grow unchecked — and it is precisely the story McKennon is determined to change.

The Hidden Tax on Ambition

When economists and policymakers discuss the costs of regulation, they tend to reach for aggregate numbers. The National Federation of Independent Business has documented consistently that regulatory compliance costs fall disproportionately on small businesses, which lack the dedicated legal and compliance departments that larger corporations employ as a matter of course. A regulation that costs a Fortune 500 company a rounding error in its operating budget can consume weeks of a sole proprietor's time.

In Texas, the problem is compounded by an occupational licensing regime that has expanded steadily over recent decades with insufficient scrutiny of whether each new requirement genuinely protects the public or simply protects incumbent businesses from new competition. The Texas Institute for Justice has identified hundreds of licensed occupations in the state, many of which require training hours and examination fees that bear no rational relationship to consumer safety outcomes.

McKennon's position is straightforward: every licensing requirement should be required to justify its existence. If a license does not demonstrably protect consumers from genuine harm, it should be eliminated or significantly reformed. The burden of proof belongs on the regulation, not on the entrepreneur seeking to make an honest living.

Marcus and the Machinery of Delay

Marcus Thibodaux spent twenty-two years working in commercial HVAC systems before deciding, at age forty-four, to start his own company in the Houston suburbs. He had the skills, the client relationships, and the capital. What he did not anticipate was an eight-month licensing and permitting process that required him to engage a regulatory consultant just to understand which forms applied to his specific business structure.

"I'm not against having standards," Marcus explains. "I've seen what bad HVAC work looks like. Standards matter. But there's a difference between a standard that protects people and a process that just... grinds you down until you give up or make a mistake that costs you money."

He persevered. Many do not. The entrepreneurs who never start, the businesses that never hire their second or fifth or tenth employee — these are the invisible casualties of regulatory overreach, and they never appear in any jobs report.

McKennon's regulatory reform agenda includes a specific commitment to streamlining the business formation process, creating a unified digital portal for licensing applications across relevant state agencies, and imposing hard deadlines on agency review timelines. Government delay is not a neutral inconvenience. It is a cost imposed on working Texans, and it will be treated as such.

Cutting Red Tape Is Not Cutting Corners

The political opponents of deregulation often conflate the two, suggesting that any reduction in regulatory burden necessarily means reduced safety or consumer protection. This is a false choice, and Texas entrepreneurs deserve a political leader willing to say so plainly.

Safety standards and consumer protections that are grounded in evidence and proportionate to actual risk are worth defending. Licensing requirements that exist primarily because an existing industry lobbied for them — that is a different matter entirely, and it deserves to be called what it is: government-enforced protectionism that disadvantages the very competition that drives quality and lowers prices for consumers.

McKennon supports a comprehensive review of Texas occupational licensing statutes, modeled on the kind of sunset review process the state already applies to agencies, but applied specifically to licensing requirements with a mandate to eliminate those that cannot demonstrate a public safety rationale. This is not radical. It is responsible governance.

The Workforce Connection

Small business deregulation is not only about the business owners themselves. Every unnecessary barrier to starting a business is also a barrier to the jobs that business would have created. Texas has built a remarkable reputation as a destination for corporate relocations and major employers, but the backbone of the Texas economy has always been the small and mid-sized businesses that employ the majority of the state's private-sector workforce.

When a cosmetologist in Lubbock faces licensing requirements that demand more training hours than an emergency medical technician, something has gone wrong in the policy process. When a food truck operator in Austin must navigate permits from three different city departments before serving a single customer, the message sent to aspiring entrepreneurs is unmistakable: this system was not designed for you.

McKennon will work with the Texas Legislature to ensure that state-level regulatory reform is paired with pressure on municipalities to align their own permitting processes with the principle of economic freedom. Local governments have legitimate authority, but that authority should not be exercised as a mechanism for suppressing the entrepreneurial energy that sustains Texas communities.

Freedom as the Foundation

Rosa Medina's bakery is thriving today. Marcus Thibodaux's HVAC company has four employees and is growing. Their success is a testament to what Texans accomplish when given a genuine opportunity — not a subsidy, not a government program, but simply the freedom to build without being buried.

McKennon's economic vision begins with that premise and builds outward from it. A Texas where starting a business is straightforward, where compliance burdens are proportionate to actual risk, and where the entrepreneur's first encounter with government is marked by clarity rather than confusion — that is a Texas where opportunity is not just promised, but made real.

The small business revolution is already underway. The right leadership can accelerate it.