Entrepreneurship has become one of the most important engines of economic development. Across the country, public agencies, philanthropy, financial institutions, and investors have expanded access to startup capital, accelerators, incubators, and technical assistance. Those investments have helped millions of entrepreneurs launch businesses and strengthen local economies.
Yet launching businesses and creating jobs are not always the same objective.
As the entrepreneurship ecosystem continues to mature, an important question deserves greater attention: Where does each incremental investment create the greatest employment impact?
Research consistently shows that firms with established customers, product-market fit, and existing employees account for a disproportionate share of net new job creation. By the time a business employs ten people, it has already overcome many of entrepreneurship’s greatest challenges. It has validated demand, developed operating systems, built customer relationships, and demonstrated that its business model works.
Scaling from ten employees to twenty is still difficult, but it is fundamentally different from building a workforce from scratch.
The difference becomes clear when viewed through an economic development lens. Imagine investing in ten growth-stage businesses, each employing ten people. Helping each company expand to twenty employees creates one hundred new jobs. By comparison, helping ten solo entrepreneurs grow to five employees creates forty new jobs. Both investments create meaningful impact, but they produce different employment outcomes and require different forms of support.
This is not an either-or proposition. Healthy entrepreneurial ecosystems need startup formation and business expansion.
However, if job creation is the objective, the missing middle deserves a larger share of investment.
That belief shaped the Cumbre Model. 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 will not be defined solely by the number of businesses we help start.
It will also be defined by the number of businesses we help grow.
Diagnose. Identify. Invest. Scale.
