For the past five years, the Stanford Latino Entrepreneurship Initiative has collected survey data from Latino-owned businesses across the country to provide an updated account of the latest trends in Latino entrepreneurship in the United States. For the past two years, we have also simultaneously created a research panel of over 1,000 Latino business owners that will provide insights on the growth and experiences of individual businesses over time. This year, we report results on a cumulative sample of approximately 5,000 Latino business owners. Additionally, we explore a longitudinal aspect of the data from businesses that report their revenue from the past 12 months in addition to their revenues from two and five years ago.
The State of Latino Entrepreneurship report provides academic researchers, lending institutions, business leaders, and policymakers with insights into the business outcomes of Latino-owned businesses and the personal financial well-being of their owners. Given our large sample and specialized focus on Latino-owned businesses, we consider outcomes by different business dimensions, including size (e.g., by revenue and employees), growth, industry, region, and other demographic characteristics of the business owner (e.g., gender, immigrant status, etc.). We also focus extensively on business outcomes related to different funding types and apply a financing matrix that advances a typology of amounts requested and received. Where available, we draw comparisons from the SLEI Survey of U.S. Latino Business Owners to the outcomes of non-Latinos through a variety of census surveys. These include the American Community Surveys and Current Population Surveys, which consider self-employed individuals, and the Annual Survey of Entrepreneurs, which considers employer firms.