Adam Urbanski is the kind of guy whose name is usually followed by sappy cliches about the land of opportunity and its possibilities for living the American Dream. A Polish immigrant, it is said that he arrived on these shores in 1989 with less than $200 in his pocket, built a hugely successful restaurant business during the early 1990s, and sold it for millions some years later.

After that successful foray into entrepreneurship, Urbanski very naturally thought, Well, that was fun. Let’s see if I can do it again. He took some of the skills he had learned in his previous business and started a consulting firm specializing in corporate coaching and team building.

But there’s just something about living in the world of small business ownership that often makes people unfit for the alternate universe of corporate America. “I absolutely couldn’t relate to corporate and the drones that work there when I had been a small business owner since forever,” he told me in his gentle and charmingly accented voice.

After torturing himself like this for awhile, Urbanski decided to retool his business and refocusing his target to allow himself to work with people he was more comfortable with — small business owners, independent contractors and fellow coaches. That was about five years ago.

The result, Marketing Mentors, Inc., is an Irvine, CA-based micro-corporation with only one employee besides Adam - and something in the vicinity of $1.2 million in revenues.

So much for the popular wisdom that says a business that small couldn’t possibly make that much money.

Rather than offering marketing services to his clients, Urbanski offers marketing education, supplying them with concepts and techniques that they can apply to their own businesses. It is an interesting line of work, simply because there are many, many microbusiness owners out there who get hives at the prospect of marketing, even though they understand that it needs to be done.

Urbanski is tolerant of the generally ill-odor that the discipline of marketing has among the overall universe of his potential customers. “That’s because they don’t understand what marketing really is and how it works,” he explained to me during our telephone conversation. “Once they understand it, they love it.”

In many ways, Urbanski is a typical microbusiness owner.

He cares more about personal growth than he does about quarterly earnings projections and building empires.

He cares about developing and maintaining mutually respectful service relationships. He wants the best clients (for him) rather than the most clients.

He believes in purpose; he told me that successful businesses are those whose owners stay true to their vision instead of just trying to cram products down people’s throats.

In one important way, however, he appears to be very different from the typical microbusiness owner. That is, he wants to grow his organization in ways that are a bit more traditional than many microbusiness owners. In fact, Urbanski says he can envision growing to about 100 employees and somewhere between $20 and $50 million in revenues.

At first glance, it seems like a curious ambition because Urbanski doesn’t come across as the kind of guy who is in love with money for its own sake.

So I asked him, “You make an awful lot of money and many people would say that $1.2 million a year is enough. Why keep growing?”

His reply: “Because it’s fun.”

Which is, now that I think about it, also pretty typical of microbusiness owners.

Asked about his biggest business headache, Urbanski talks about the difficulty he has with delegating and with giving up control, another recurring theme among small business owners in general and high-earning microbusiness owners in particular.

What Urbanski doesn’t mention is that ultimate paradox of the growth-oriented microbusiness owner. He wants to grow his business. He says the problem is that he needs to grow enough as a person to relinquish control. He recognizes that business growth involves acknowledging that one person simply can’t do everything.

At the same time, it is a fact that the larger the organization grows, the more distance will develop between him and the service he offers. And the reason that’s a problem is because Adam Urbanski loves to teach. It’s going to be hard for him to keep his hand in the most personally rewarding part of his business if he is busy with administration — even if that is the way to make his business grow.

One of the most interesting developments of the 21st century economy will undoubtedly be the process by which high-earning microbusiness owners like Adam Urbanski develop business models and systems that resolve that paradox.

Ten or twenty years from now, economists will be writing Nobel Prize-winning papers describing the results.

You and I will be able to say we got to watch it happen.