In a country built by immigrants, numbers represent the strength and ability to move forward both culturally and economically. Such is the case for Latinos, a growing force in the United States currently representing 18 percent of the overall population - a number expected to grow to 30 percent by 2060.

The economic impact Latinos have in the country as a group is growing at a steady rate, and according to Nielsen, a global information measurement firm, Latinos are “the most influential segment since the baby boomers,” representing a $1.5 trillion consumer market.

The economic impact extends beyond the Latino consumer to the Latino entrepreneur. The State of Latino Entrepreneurship 2015 Report, created by the Stanford Latino Entrepreneurship Initiative (SLEI), highlighted data that reveal the economic impact that Latino-owned businesses (LOBs) have on the U.S. economy.

Housed within Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, the Stanford Latino Entrepreneurship Initiative is a unique research collaboration between Stanford University and the Latino Business Action Network (LBAN), a 501(c)3 not-for-profit organization located in Palo Alto, California. This report also debunked several myths regarding the markets and industries in which LOBs are found.

Latinos are significantly impacting the growth in number of small businesses in the United States. The State of Latino Entrepreneurship 2015 report revealed that between 2007 and 2012, the number of LOBs grew by 46.9 percent compared to just 0.7 percent for non-Latino owned businesses, an extraordinary level of entrepreneurship that suggests Latinos play a substantial role in local job creation and economic development.

A closer look at the growth in the number of small businesses between 2007 and 2012 shows that 86 percent of the growth in all small businesses during this time can be attributed to LOBs In fact, without LOBs the United States would see a serious drop in the number of small businesses.

Debunking the Myths of Latino Biz

There are two common theories posed by many that deserve note. One is that LOBs are smaller because they sell primarily to Latinos and thereby are not taking advantage of the complete U.S. market. The research debunked this myth as it found that 80 percent of LOBs sell to the complete domestic market.

The second theory proposed is that LOBs are smaller because LOBs oversubscribe to small slow-growth industries. The research debunked this myth as well, as it found that LOBs are actually over-indexed in the top fastest-growing industries in the country.

The study did reveal one of the main reasons LOBs remain small: access to capital. The research shows that 70 percent of Latino entrepreneurs cited that their most common source of capital is personal savings, with credit cards, personal bank loans and “friend’s loans” being the following most used options.

Surprisingly, only 6.1 percent of LOBs in this panel have financed their business with a commercial loan and roughly 2.4 percent have financed their business with a government loan. This indicates that the traditional sources of capital - such as VCs, angel investors, bank business loans and debt financing - have been almost totally absent in the funding of LOBs.

We surveyed more than 2,000 Latino-owned businesses and found that by 2012, there were 3.3 million LOBs - 90 percent of which were family owned. The study also revealed that the 3.3 million LOBs had an average of 8.6 employees per firm and an average of $155,806 in sales per firm annually, employing 2.3 million workers and generating a total of $473 billion in sales.

Perhaps the most important insight revealed by the study was the “opportunity gap,” which refers to the current gap between the average yearly sales generated by LOBs and not Latino owned business (NLOBs).

The potential impact on the U.S. economy if LOBs generated the same level of sales as NLOBs was calculated over the period of 2002-2012. A pattern was found to exist over these years.

For example, in 2012 alone, if all LOBs averaged the same yearly sales per firm as all NLOBs, $1.38 trillion would have been added to the U.S. economy. The results were astonishing, as they represent an incredible opportunity for growth and economic development. This serves as undeniable evidence that investing and creating new opportunities for Latino entrepreneurs is key for a thriving economy.

Jerry Porrasid is professor emeritus, Stanford University and chairman of LBAN; and Remy Arteaga is executive director of LBAN

About the Latino Business Action Network (LBAN)

In 2012, Professor Jerry Porras and a group of Stanford Alums came together to form a non-profit 501(c)3 organization, the Latino Business Action Network (LBAN), focused on making America stronger by improving the lives of Latinos. LBAN funded research and education programs at Stanford University centered on empowering Latino business owners to grow large businesses.

Entrepreneurs tend to take for granted how easy it is to start media companies in the U.S. The abundance of capital and potential ad revenue and lack of governmental censorship make it relatively simple for anyone with an idea to get something started. (Whether they’ll be able to sustain it is another question entirely.)

Other countries aren’t so lucky. Take Venezuela, where years of inflation have tripled food prices and brought economic growth to a standstill. That’s made daily life hard not just for Venezuelan citizens, but also for the country’s media entrepreneurs, who have struggled to find the funds they need to get started and stay afloat.

Media entrepreneurs in other South American countries face similar challenges, and they lack a central place to share ideas on how to solve them. SembraMedia hopes to fill that gap. The site, whose name is a play on “to sow” in Spanish, is trying to build both a directory and digital community of media startups in Latin America. The hope is that by bringing them together, SembraMedia can help founders turn ideas into reality, and startups into sustainable businesses.

“Our mission is to support people who are creating new projects. One of the best ways to do that is to empower as many people as possible and bring them together,” said Janine Warner, SembraMedia’s executive director. (SembraMedia itself is supported by the Institute for Nonprofit News, National Endowment for Democracy, and the Cook Family Foundation.)

The first step, however, is figuring out who those people are. While SembraMedia estimates that there are as many as 2,000 Spanish-language media sites in Latin America, there hasn’t been one central directory that collects them all. To help with that process, SembraMedia has hired ambassadors in each country, who will be in charge of building and maintaining the communities within their countries.

The idea for SembraMedia came from Warner’s experience teaching an online course in enterprise journalism at the University of Texas. Warner saw no shortage of students with great ideas, but they lacked an understanding of how to turn those ideas into actual businesses. “Across the board, almost all of them needed the most help with making money, building a business model, and understanding what it means to be a businessperson,” Warner said.

SembraMedia plans to offer entrepreneurs that education through its site, via monthly case studies of successful sites and video interviews with the people who run them. But it hopes that many of the insights will come via conversations between entrepreneurs themselves. Once it adds a few hundred sites to its directory, it plans to build an online forum for entrepreneurs to talk, share ideas, and collaborate on projects.

The effort is similar to ALiados, a network of independent news organizations in Latin America launched in 2013. The goal there, as with SembraMedia, was to help the member sites find sustainability by teaming up on grant applications and marketing initiatives.

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SembraMedia’s biggest challenge, however, is understanding and managing for the reality that no two Latin American countries are alike, said Michal Iastrebner, SembraMedia’s regional director. While the governments of Cuba and Venezuela have a tight grip on the press, Chile has been more welcoming to both the press and entrepreneurs overall. These differences means that what works in one country might not work in another.

Ultimately, SembraMedia hopes that the best practices it discovers in Latin America can be applied abroad as well. Warner pointed to Ojo Público, a nonprofit investigative journalism and fact-checking site in Peru. Fabiola Torres, one of the site’s founders (and a SembraMedia ambassador), presented a project at the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting conference in Denver called “Intensive Care,” a searchable database of 60,000 doctors and health insurance companies. Chequeado, a fact-checking site in Argentina, has also built a model that Warner says media sites elsewhere should emulate.

“We hope what we learn can also help traditional media companies in Latin America to be more innovative and bring fresh ideas to media companies in the U.S.,” she said.

The author writes for The Nieman Journalism Lab