By Harry Hollines
We need to rethink where private equity and growth infrastructure are deployed.
Today, most private equity capital flows toward companies already generating $10M+ in revenue — businesses with established systems, professionalized operations, and lower execution risk. In many ways, returns are optimized after the hardest part of the growth journey has already been completed.
But a major opportunity exists further downstream:
growth-stage businesses generating roughly $500K–$1M in annual revenue.
This is particularly true among Latino-owned businesses, one of the fastest-growing segments of the U.S. economy. These businesses are driving local job creation and regional economic activity, yet fewer than 3% ever surpass the $1M revenue threshold.
That is not a talent problem.
It is a structural problem.
Most businesses at this stage lack access to experienced operators, scalable systems, leadership development, diagnostics, and strategic growth infrastructure. As a result, capital alone often fails to produce the desired outcomes.
Applying traditional private equity return expectations to this segment without operational support simply breaks the model.
The answer is not less discipline — it is a different approach:
Diagnose → Fix → Invest → Scale.
That means identifying constraints, strengthening leadership, building systems, and improving execution before aggressively scaling capital deployment.
Because when a $500K business becomes a $1M+ business, the impact compounds:
- jobs are created,
- local economies grow,
- tax bases expand,
- and long-term wealth is built.
This is not just about returns.
It is about where the next generation of economic growth will come from.
