Latino-owned businesses are growing in number and importance to the American economy. Contributing more than $700 billion in sales to the economy annually, they are also an important source of employment as sole proprietors and as firms with employees on payroll. One in four new businesses, traditionally key sources of new jobs, is now Latino-owned. Quite simply, small business growth is tied to the fortunes of Latino-owned businesses.
This report builds on earlier work from Stanford Latino Entrepreneurship Initiative and the Aspen Institute to probe firm-level and environmental-level growth factors that influence Latino business performance. By comparing Latino-owned firms to non-Latino white-owned firms, unscaled Latino firms to scaled firms, and metro areas of relatively strong Latino entrepreneurship to those with smaller shares of Latino businesses, we are able to discern the most acute challenges and begin to highlight remedies to these challenges. This report draws on analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data, surveys from SLEI and the Federal Reserve Banks, and interviews with unscaled and scaled Latino-owned firms as part of a research collaboration between Stanford Graduate School of Business, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and Interise.