Black women are starting employer businesses faster than almost anyone. They are also running the smallest ones.

The 2026 Wells Fargo Impact of Women-Owned Businesses * report puts average revenue for Black/African American women-owned employers at $650,000, the lowest of any group measured—part of what makes the hidden cost of not scaling so steep for Black women-owned employers. White women-owned employers average $1.7 million. Asian American women-owned employers average $1.6 million.

That number matters because of a second finding in the same data. Between 2022 and 2025, only women-owned employers above $1 million in revenue grew consistently across firm count, employment, and revenue. Everything below that line stalled or contracted.

Hiring the first employee is the threshold everyone talks about. The million-dollar line is the second threshold, and it decides whether a business compounds or merely survives. Vanessa Best crossed it.

Hiring Isn't The Finish Line. The Second Threshold Is

Best is founder and CEO of Precision HealthCare Consultants, a healthcare research and advisory firm she began as a solo consultant in the late 1990s and rebuilt as a company in 2014. Today it runs clinical trial recruitment, site identification, and regulatory training for pharmaceutical, biotech, and medical device clients, with more than 50 employees and offices in New York, Washington, Atlanta, and Nairobi.

She knows exactly where the second threshold sits because it once locked her out of a room. An angel investor told her to join the Women Presidents Organization (WPO), which required $1 million in annual revenue at the time. WPO is a nonprofit membership organization that runs peer advisory groups for women who own and lead multimillion-dollar businesses, connecting them for mentorship, networking, and shared problem-solving to help grow their companies."I was doing all of this great work, but I was not at a million," Best recalled. She is a member now.

Ask her which crossing was hardest and she does not name a revenue figure. "I think it was employment," she said, "because they’re expensive." The one that was the hardest was hiring abroad, specifically finding someone who could run operations "across the world where I'm not at" without any drop in quality.

Growth Is Not The Constraint. Scale Is

The data backs her up in an uncomfortable way. Black women-owned employer firms grew 18.3% in count and 23.1% in employment between 2022 and 2025, both well ahead of the 8.0% and 11.1% rates for women-owned employers overall.

The bottleneck sits earlier and later, not in the middle. Black women make up 19.5% of women-owned nonemployer businesses but only 6.4% of women-owned employers, and the ones who cross the $1 million revenue band.

Certification Became The Capital She Could Not Borrow

Asked to name the single structural barrier that slowed her most, Best answered in two words: capital access.

She is describing something the national numbers make plain. In 2024, only 42% of businesses receiving Small Business Administration loans were women-owned, despite federal guarantees of up to 85%, and just 30% of businesses backed by private capital were owned by women.

So Best built on the only balance sheet available to her. "Our path was certification," she said, listing New York State M/WBE status, SBA 8(a), HUBZone, WBENC, and NMSDC. She is careful about what that did and did not do, "Not that we ever led with the certifications, but it just enabled us to be at the table."

Pushed on whether founders understand contracting as a growth strategy at all, she was blunt. "I don't think entrepreneurs appreciate it," she said. Then she drew the line she wanted drawn. Certification is not a handout, because the work comes first. "That's not what gets us the business," she said. "It's the quality of our work."

The unexpected payoff was not the prime contracts. Certification "also unlocked subcontracting opportunities with some of the largest organizations," which, she noted, "provided really a way for us to learn" how large institutions budget, prepare proposals, and run internal reviews. In a sense, it was like being an apprentice. Other women-owned firms have described the same contracting-as-classroom dynamic .

When a conventional bank line of credit did not materialize, she financed growth through a community development financial institution instead. CDFI programs financed more than 109,000 businesses and originated more than $24 billion in loans and investments in fiscal year 2024, and they exist largely because firms like hers keep getting declined upstream.

Networks Did What The Balance Sheet Could Not

The IWOB report names limited networks in funding circles as a driver of capital disparity. Best names the remedy.

Through EY's Entrepreneurs Access Network and EY Winning Women, Best got introductions that "opened up not just doors for working with pharma, but even working with the government... in Europe,” she explained. Her description of what that access felt like is the sharpest line in the interview: "They didn't just open a door; they made a hallway for me." She added, "When you're connected, then it makes all of the difference."

"Every founder's journey is different, but no one should have to navigate growth alone," said Nit Reeder of the EY Entrepreneurs Access Network. "The EY Entrepreneurs Access Network (EAN) brings entrepreneurs together for candid conversations, meaningful connections and opportunities that might otherwise remain out of reach."

The federal ecosystem played a similar role. Best was named Minority Health Care Firm of the Year by the U.S. Department of Commerce's Minority Business Development Agency (MBDA) in 2021, after the same recognition from the Manhattan MBDA center in 2020.

"At the Business Outreach Center/MBDA Manhattan Center, we serve the small business community as a foil and as a mirror, helping founders like Vanessa amplify their strengths, discover opportunities they might never have seen, and giving them the technical assistance and networking needed to pivot with confidence," said Roxanne Neilson, managing director of the MBDA Manhattan Center.

Best’s advice to any Black woman running a services firm stuck below the million-dollar line is not about capital at all. "You have to join a tribe," she said.

The Same Counting Problem, At Two Scales

Precision exists because clinical research keeps missing people. "Most of the larger clinical research organizations do not have a focus on forgotten communities, which include minorities, indigenous populations, and rural populations, even women, because those populations don't usually trust big pharma," Best explained. Those four groups, in her words, are "often left out of research."

Her firm sells proximity rather than technology. "Generic clinical trial recruitment just can't touch these communities," she noted, "but with us, since we're part of the community, the trust is already there." That means staff embedded locally, nurse navigators, mobile units, and long relationships with community health centers.

She rejects the idea that federal enrollment rules are what drive her pipeline. "It's a scientific decision, not an ethical or diversity decision," she argued. "If populations aren't included, then their drugs are not going to work."

That logic scales. A drug tested on an unrepresentative sample fails in the real world, and an economy that counts business formation while ignoring business scale misreads its own capacity the same way.

What Gets Counted Gets Built

Best did not arrive at this work through a lab. She points to "experiences that I've seen in my family without access to care, or being on medication that never included them in clinical trials. That just really pushed me to do what I can, so that no one else has that problem."

The recognition has followed: Enterprising Women of the Year in 2025, WPO's Women2Watch and the JPMorgan Chase Women of Impact award in 2024, LIBN's Top 50 Women in Business in 2023, SBA Women Business Champion back in 2017, multiple Inc. 5000 listings, and a spot on Inc.'s 2026 Female Founders 500.

Hearing the IWOB figures read back to her during our conversation, she paused, then said, "It's amazing listening to the statistics. How that perfectly reflects my journey."

Then, in the same breath: "It's a reality. So we need to figure out what we do to change it."

The author is the president and CEO of Ventureneer, the lead author of the Impact of Women-Owned Businesses report.