To understand the role that immigrant business owners play in Boston’s small business ecosystem, you need only to walk through any Boston Main Streets district. In the Brighton Main Street district, you’ll hear Wanderleira Ribeiro’s Brazilian Portuguese as you walk by Daniel’s Bakery, known for her delicious cakes and pastries.  Travel to East Boston, and you’ll be treated to Colombian Spanish, spoken by Lady Sepúlveda and Esteban Peña at their restaurant El Paisa, famous for their weekend brunch. In Roxbury’s Dudley Square Main Street district, you’ll hear Somali and Arabic as you peruse the wares of small business owners from the Middle East and North Africa offering coffee, clothing, health and beauty products, and more. 

Boston’s Main Streets organizations are a key partner to the City of Boston as they offer these businesses one-on-one assistance, host merchant meetings, provide trainings, and facilitate these businesses’ connections to City resources. As a result, the City of Boston’s Office of Business Development, in partnership with key City agencies, local organizations and community leaders, is able to expand its work to support immigrant business owners in their efforts to start and grow their businesses. 

Studying Immigrant Entrepreneurship in Boston

As part of this effort, Ksenia Kaladiouk, an intern through the Harvard University Rappaport Fellowship, worked in partnership with the Office of Business Development, the Mayor’s Office of New Bostonians, and the Boston Redevelopment Authority to conduct an analysis of the immigrant small business community in Boston.

As compiling data on small businesses can be complex, and given the importance of relationships as a tool for gathering information, the majority of the Ksenia’s research focused on first-person interviews with key business leaders, Main Streets organizations, business and technical assistance organizations, and surveys of business owners themselves.  These interviews offered a wealth of insight into the opportunities and challenges faced by Boston’s immigrant entrepreneurs.

Results and Challenges

More than 100 business owners from 24 countries participated in this project, and the study discovered that immigrant entrepreneurs shared a strong commitment to creating businesses that elevate the community as a whole.  Many reported choosing business ownership as a lifestyle -- albeit one with long hours -- not simply a means for making money, and many spoke of strong self-reliance.   

“I do everything for myself. Sometimes I think this is a weakness for us business owners—wanting to do everything on our own. But it’s a point of pride, you know?”

The business owners surveyed represented a wide range of business sectors, from restaurants, clothing retailers and grocery stores, to plumbing companies and independent electricians. Many of the brick and mortar businesses surveyed are located in business districts with rents below the city market rate average and are often key businesses driving the revitalization of these districts. 

Lady Sepúlveda and Esteban Peña stand in front of El Paisa, a restaurant located in the heart of the East Boston Main Street district famous for its weekend brunch.

The survey surfaced a few key challenges for immigrant entrepreneurs in Boston:

• Business owners identified challenges around navigating a new culture, while also needing to learn the intricacies of city and federal regulations required to open and grow their businesses.
• Many reported that their primary sources of information regarding available resources are often friends or family members, rather than resource providers or City staff themselves. This was reinforced by their reported need for increased, culturally-sensitive education about the many resources available to immigrants as they start and expand their businesses.
• Entrepreneurs also identified differences in ethnicity, customs, and language as a challenge that could make it difficult to expand their customer base and reach new markets outside of their language or cultural community. 

Opportunities and Next Steps

The City of Boston is currently undertaking its first ever Small Business Plan, which will shape how to best serve Boston's entrepreneurs and small businesses over the next 3-5 years. Informed by rigorous data collection methods, the plan will use data to show the current state of small business in Boston, assess how well the needs of Boston's entrepreneurs and small businesses are being met, and develop a set of recommendations and an implementation plan to better serve entrepreneurs and small businesses in Boston.

Built into this plan will be thoughtful recommendations about how to better serve immigrant entrepreneurs. Some potential ideas included:

• One business owner spoke of a circle lending in his Somali community, through which each member of the community receives financial support on a rotating basis. This network has evolved based on their limited access to capital, and could potentially serve as a model for further research and potential replication. 
• Other business owners mentioned key community leaders who served as sources of information and connections to resources; as a result, we are currently working with the Mayor’s Office of New Bostonians to explore the formation of an immigrant entrepreneurship ambassador network made up of these key community leaders who can assist the City in serving immigrant entrepreneurs.
• Given the variety of ways that information travels in Boston’s immigrant communities, the plan will also consider the use of varied communication channels to ensure that business owners have multiple access points to the resources they need. Such examples could include radio, phone (including text), TV and other media channels, and social media. 

Owner of Daniel's Bakery, Wanderleira Ribeiro is known for her delicious cakes and pastries.

Outside of the Small Business Plan effort, the City has already launched several initiatives to streamline the licensing and permitting process for all businesses, including developing online licensing and permitting tools to increase access to information about opening and expanding businesses in the City. The City is also looking at national examples of language access initiatives to improve language access for all City departments.  
In addition, Mayor Walsh recently increased funding for the Office of Business Development’s On-Site Technical Assistance program, which matches businesses with consultants who are able to provide assistance in a variety of languages. These consultants are available to assist immigrant-owned businesses and others with financial management, customer experience consulting, marketing strategy, legal consulting, business strategy and in-depth business operations consulting. Research showed that 90 percent of the businesses participating in the Technical Assistance Program this past year are owned by immigrants, many of whom have a goal of expanding into new markets.  For example, the owners of El Paisa Restaurant participated in the program and optimized their operations through a new pricing tool, Point of Sale system, a new menu and brand. The majority of the businesses that received comprehensive on-site assistance increased their revenues by an average of 50 percent in the six months following the engagement, and reported an increase in new customers from new customer segments.

The City of Boston looks forward to working with the Boston Main Streets organizations as they continue to roll out more offerings that are tailored to our immigrant entrepreneur community, recognizing that they cannot do this without them. Together, along with Boston’s business associations, community leaders, assistance providers, business owners and the customers of these small businesses, the next five years hold extraordinary promise for Boston’s small business community.

Betsy Cowan is the Program Lead for Business Technical Assistance with the goal of expanding access to technical assistance through City programs and partnerships with other agencies.  She has a particular focus on Immigrant Entrepreneurship, and was formerly the director of Egleston Square Main Street in Boston.


Kara Miller is the Program Lead for the Women on Main Women's Entrepreneurship program, and is increasing the marketing capacity of our department through her work on social media and other channels.  She was formerly the director of West Roxbury Main Street in Boston.  

Steve Gilman is the Program Director for Boston Main Streets and has been involved with the Boston Main Streets program, the first multi-district urban Main Street program, since 1997 when he and a group of neighbors applied for Main Streets designation status and became the founding bound member of Washington Gateway Main Streets in Boston’s South End.  A former small business owner, he went on to work for the City of Boston in neighborhood small business development.