It's been nearly 10 years since this country was hit with a recession, the likes of which we hadn't seen for decades. Businesses across the country were closing their doors and unemployment soared. This bleak situation was sharply magnified among Latinos, which reported a 66 percent drop in wealth and a 13 percent unemployment rate.
Yet during this bleak period, Latino entrepreneurs created new businesses at a startling rate, increasing from 2.3 million in 2007 to approximately 4.1 million today. As we come out on the other side of these shifts, we should take stock of our economic environment.
Shining some much-needed light on the current state of Latino entrepreneurship in the United States, the Stanford Graduate School of Business and the Stanford Latino Entrepreneurship Initiative released a study on the nation's Latino business landscape.
Based on findings garnered from surveying 4,900 companies around the country, it is clear that the Latino business community is proliferating, and at a far faster rate than non-Latino companies. To be more precise, the number of Latino-owned businesses has grown an astounding 300 percent faster than the national average over the last decade.