You can't design from a distance.
The people designing entrepreneurship programs, capital, places and systems are rarely the people navigating them. That distance creates blind spots.
Spaulding Works gets institutions closer to the businesses they're trying to serve — then turns what we learn into better strategy, programs and systems.
The business tells the truth.
Behind every entrepreneur is a business telling us what it actually needs.
These aren't abstract business concepts. They're the conditions that determine whether an entrepreneur can survive, grow, hire, invest, and build.
We listen to the business.
Field ImageProduction floor — a business at workActivity isn't outcome.
- 01Participation
- 02Capital deployed
- 03Programs delivered
- 04Businesses served
- 05Applications received
- 01Payroll
- 02Cash flow
- 03Margins
- 04Capacity
- 05Debt
- 06Customers
- 07Time
Institutional activity tells us what was offered. Entrepreneurial reality helps us understand what changed.
Not wrong. Incomplete.Get closer before you build.
Explore what we do →Understand
- Entrepreneur intelligence
- Listening sessions
- Ecosystem analysis
- Market insight
Evaluate
- Program audits
- Initiative assessments
- Entrepreneur experience
- Opportunity analysis
Build
- Program design
- Ecosystem design
- Operating models
- Partnership strategy
- Places and systems
Oversee
- Strategic implementation
- Measurement
- Decision support
- Implementation guidance
What did you build around?
Every program, fund, place and initiative is built around a set of assumptions about entrepreneurs — who they are, what they need, and what will actually help.
Spaulding Works helps institutions surface those assumptions, compare them against entrepreneurial reality, and determine what should change.
A structured examination of an entrepreneurship program, initiative, fund, place, or strategy — tested against the operating realities of the businesses it intends to serve.
- →Surfaces the assumptions inside the design
- →Tests them against how businesses actually operate
- →Returns what should change, and why
We don't assume. We ask.
Spaulding Works develops tools, conducts conversations, analyzes programs, and gathers intelligence from entrepreneurs to better understand how businesses actually operate. What we learn informs what we build.
The Business Tells the Truth
Why institutions need a different way to understand entrepreneurs.
Read when published →- 01Works Briefs
- 02Findings
- 03Reports
- 04Data Stories
- 05Field Notes
Intelligence is published as it develops.
Works Tools
Entrepreneurs get answers. We get better questions.
Revenue Reality
How much does your business actually need to make?
Hiring Reality
Can your business actually afford its next hire?
Capital Reality
How much capital does your business actually need?
Listen → Learn → Build → Measure
Listen
Get close to the entrepreneur.
Learn
Find patterns institutions can't see from the outside.
Build
Turn intelligence into programs, places, partnerships, and systems.
Measure
Return to the entrepreneur and understand what changed.
PortraitJessica SpauldingBuilt from both sides of the table.
Jessica Spaulding
Founder, Spaulding Works
Jessica Spaulding is an entrepreneur, operator, and strategist who has spent more than a decade building businesses while navigating the institutions and systems designed to support them.
As founder of the nationally recognized Harlem Chocolate Factory, she knows entrepreneurship not as a case study, but as an operating reality — from capital and cash flow to production, people, partnerships, and growth. She founded Spaulding Works to bring that reality closer to the institutions shaping what gets built for entrepreneurs.
Entrepreneur experience isn't the subject of the work. It's where the work begins.
Get closer to the business.
Building an entrepreneurship initiative?
Rethinking one that already exists?
Trying to understand why something isn't producing the outcome you expected?
Start with the people living the reality.