For decades, entrepreneurship policy has rightly emphasized business creation. Incubators, accelerators, startup capital, and technical assistance have helped millions of founders transform ideas into companies. Those investments remain essential and should continue.
At the same time, economic development has reached an important inflection point. If the objective is maximizing job creation, we should also examine where incremental investment has the greatest potential to expand employment.
Growth-stage businesses represent one of the most overlooked opportunities within the entrepreneurship ecosystem. By the time a company employs ten or more people, it has already achieved product-market fit, generated recurring revenue, built operating systems, and demonstrated an ability to hire and manage talent. The challenge is no longer proving the business concept. The challenge is removing the operational and strategic constraints that limit expansion.
The employment implications are significant. Helping ten businesses grow from ten employees to twenty employees creates one hundred new jobs. Helping ten solo entrepreneurs build organizations with five employees creates forty new jobs. Both pathways deserve investment, but they generate different economic returns.
This is why we believe entrepreneurship support should be viewed as a portfolio strategy rather than a single strategy. Startup formation and business expansion are complementary investments, not competing priorities.
The Cumbre Model was designed around this principle. Through diagnostics, benchmarking, targeted technical assistance, and a specialist investment fund, we focus on helping growth-stage businesses remove the constraints that prevent them from scaling.
The future of entrepreneurship support is not simply about creating more businesses.
It is about helping more businesses become employers.
Diagnose. Identify. Invest. Scale.
