Stanford Graduate School of Business, Latino Business Action Network
First published February 2017
With this report, the Stanford Latino Entrepreneurship Initiative (SLEI) highlights key research findings from its third annual Survey of U.S. Latino Business Owners. In this survey, we examine issues specifically related to Latino entrepreneurs and Latino-owned businesses in the United States. This report expands upon existing studies, including the 2015 and 2016 State of Latino Entrepreneurship reports. We continue to investigate financing and the importance of growth for Latino businesses and conduct further analysis on the role of national banks.
Where other third-party research on this population may focus only on specific regions or have small sample sizes, our survey of more than 5,000 self-identified Latino business owners allows us to consider various segments within the larger group (i.e., intragroup comparisons), including firm size, gender, age, and nativity of entrepreneurs.
Additionally, we collect information about growth and growth challenges, with our primary findings around financing, and include detailed business-owner demographics. This report provides academic researchers, policymakers, and business leaders with insights into U.S. Latino-owned firms and the barriers they face in scaling up their businesses.
We supplement our data with national data for other demographic groups from the most recent U.S. Census Bureau Survey of Business Owners (SBO) and the Annual Survey of Entrepreneurs (ASE), as well as other third-party data sources. Since these sources use a variety of terms to define their samples and measures, we have provided a glossary of terms in Appendix A. Read more about our methodology in Appendix B.
We include in this report insights from alumni of the Stanford Latino Entrepreneurship Initiative-Education Scaling Program (SLEI-Ed). While these contributions are currently anecdotal, as the alumni network of the program grows and we track the development of their businesses, we will include more formal analyses of the group in future reports.