She helped guide Georgia small businesses for decades. Now, she’s retiring.

After nearly 24 years leading the Small Business Administration’s Georgia office, Terri Denison has retired from the role.

“Being the Georgia district director of the U.S. Small Business Administration has been the greatest honor and I think highlight of my career,” Denison told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Denison led the state’s SBA office since May 2002. Over the years, she helped guide resources, funding, federal contracting certifications and more to small businesses across the state. She worked to get entrepreneurs resources through economic highs and lows, including the Great Recession and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Ashley Bell (from left), Region 4 Administrator, Linda McMahon, SBA Administrator, Catherine Downey, owner of CATMEDIA, and Terri Denison, District Director, SBA Georgia district office, as they gather for a photo in front of CATMEDIA. (Bob Andres/AJC)

“SBA is grateful to Terri Denison for her many years of public service and wishes her well in retirement,” Tyler Teresa, SBA regional administrator for the Southeast, said in a statement. “Under Terri’s leadership the SBA Georgia District Office approved over a billion in lending each year over the past seven years to the small business ecosystem of Georgia.”

The agency plans to name a new district director in the coming weeks.

Small businesses are a cornerstone of the American economy, employing nearly half the nation’s workforce, according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Denison first started at the SBA in 1987. As a student, she had dreamed of being a city planner or working in economic development, but the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s pushed her on a different path because local governments weren’t hiring when she finished graduate school.

Instead, she applied for a federal internship program in the waning years of the Reagan administration and, through the program, took a job at the SBA. She never ended up leaving the agency.

“There’s an expression that I always like to say that ‘you either have the calling or you don’t have the calling to work with small business, entrepreneurs,’” Denison said.

“Those of us who have the calling, we tend to stay longer because we really, truly enjoy the work. I think we enjoy the fact that we’re helping people to empower themselves by creating their own economic enterprises and really controlling their own economic destiny by creating their own businesses.”

But Denison said she is ready at this point in her life to pursue things she hasn’t had the time to while working.

“I’m very cognizant that at this point in life, I have more life behind me than ahead of me. And so there’s always that question of, you know, what are some of the other things I would like to do? What are some other things I’d like to explore that maybe I didn’t have time doing working for SBA and as the Georgia district director, because definitely it was not a 40-hour-a-week job,” she said.

“But now it’s time for me to kind of focus on me and explore some of those other things I’d like to do,” she said, like house projects, traveling, writing and ballroom dancing.

The past year has also been a tumultuous time for government employees as President Donald Trump has worked to remake the federal workforce. Since Trump’s inauguration last year, the SBA’s workforce has shrunk by about 2,700 employees, according to a White House Office of Personnel and Management dashboard. The current SBA administrator is Kelly Loeffler, a former Georgia Republican senator.

The SBA also announced last March it would be relocating regional offices out of six cities it has deemed sanctuary cities, including Atlanta.

There is no single definition of a sanctuary city; rather, it is a broad term applied to jurisdictions that have policies aimed at limiting cooperation with federal immigration enforcement actions. Georgia law prohibits sanctuary cities, and the city of Atlanta has denied the characterization that it is one.