DR. TIFFANY BUSSEY PUBLISHES ESSENCE OP-ED ON SCALING BUSINESSES

Originally published on Essence.com 

Black women are consistently reported as the largest group of founders starting or running small businesses. Yet only a small fraction of those businesses scale into employer firms and build sustainable wealth. It cannot be said that this is due to a lack of ambition, innovation or work ethic. Rather, it is a systemic barrier known as the “concrete ceiling.”

The concrete ceiling is a “unique, compounded barrier that women of color face.” It is “much tougher to break than glass” and is “also impossible to see through.” Unable to advance in corporate America, many Black women turn to entrepreneurship for stability and independence.

In the first half of 2025, nearly 300,000 Black women exited the U.S. labor force. This wave of departures was attributed to policy changes in both the public and private sectors, which largely affected the roles they held. In response to the sudden job loss, many Black women launched small businesses at an overwhelming rate. But starting a business and scaling one are two very different challenges.

Despite the surge in Black women launching small businesses, they struggle to scale their businesses into employer firms and generate annual revenue comparable to that of their counterparts. In 2025, Black women-owned employer firms had the lowest average revenue at $650,000, as reported in the 2026 Wells Fargo Impact of Women-Owned Businesses report (IWOB).

The report points out that Black women-owned employers generate lower revenue because they are unable to scale their businesses into employer firms. Their inability to scale is due to systemic barriers, including unequal access to capital, differences in industry concentration and weaker professional networks.

Without the infrastructure necessary to grow, too many promising ventures remain small, undercapitalized, and overextended. To reduce or eliminate these challenges, business support organizations (BSOs) such as incubators, accelerators, and entrepreneurship centers have established collaborative ecosystems that introduce initiatives to provide technical assistance, mentorship and equitable access to capital.

The Morehouse Innovation & Entrepreneurship Center (MIEC) in Atlanta offers one example of how these ecosystems can work in practice. For more than two decades, MIEC has been part of a collaborative, data-driven ecosystem of BSOs that equip adult and student founders with vital resources and knowledge to scale their businesses into employer firms.

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