New Page — The Long Tail Agency

Where it stands today

Real owners. Real businesses. Six cohorts of evidence.

Launchpad is a nine-week accelerator that builds small business owners to the standard a lender underwrites against, so the wealth this city is generating actually reaches the people who have anchored these communities for decades. Six cohorts in Los Angeles and Washington, DC. Now coming to Miami.

6

Cohorts delivered

Los Angeles & Washington, DC

120+

Businesses enrolled

100% LMI & minority/women-owned

$2,600

Cost per business

Fully loaded, funder-covered

$195K

The ask

3 cohorts, 75 Miami businesses, year one

The gap we build for

Capital gets deployed. Readiness gets assumed.

A great deal of thoughtful money has moved into Miami's underinvested business communities. Grants, loans, real estate support, a real ecosystem of assistance. And the pattern that keeps repeating is not a failure of capital or of the businesses. It is a gap in sequencing.

An owner finishes a workshop, gets pointed toward financing, and walks into underwriting blind. Their revenue is real but lumpy. Their books were kept for themselves, not for a stranger who has to trust them. Nothing about the business is broken. It was simply never built to be read by the person deciding.

Launchpad closes that specific gap. A lending partner sets the finish line before week one, and nine weeks are built backward from it. What comes out the other side is a pipeline of qualified borrowers, and a growing case file showing what these businesses clear when someone builds them for it.

Inside a Launchpad session

Why now, and why Miami

The boom is real. The question is who it reaches.

Capital, companies and people have poured into Miami over the past few years. Property values are up, new industries have arrived, and the city is being written about as a place where wealth gets made. That is genuinely good news, and it is not landing evenly. A few miles from the towers, businesses that have anchored their blocks for decades still cannot get a working capital loan.

Booms distribute along existing lines unless somebody intervenes deliberately. The businesses in Overtown, Liberty City, Little Havana and Hialeah are not short on hustle or customers. They are short on the financial infrastructure that converts a good business into a financeable one, and short on the tools that would let them compete for the demand the boom created.

AI is about to widen that gap or close it. Every advantage a small business owner used to buy from an agency — copywriting, targeting, creative production, customer analysis — is collapsing in price right now. That is the single biggest equalizer to reach small business in a generation.

But historically, LMI entrepreneurs are the last to get access to new technology, and by the time it reaches them the advantage has been captured. This is the window. Teach these owners to use these tools now and they compete on close to even footing. Wait five years and we will be writing about another gap.

Dean Watkins · Miami native and Launchpad director

I grew up in Miami. Miami Lakes. And like a lot of people I know, I felt I had to leave to become the professional and the entrepreneur I wanted to be. The opportunities, the networks, the rooms I needed were somewhere else.

I have spent fifteen years building demand for national brands and the last several putting that same machinery in the hands of small business owners in Los Angeles and Washington. It works. I have watched it work.

I do not want leaving to be the price of ambition for the next generation of Miami entrepreneurs. I want to bring what I built across the country home, at exactly the moment this city is deciding who its growth belongs to.

Dean Watkins — Co-founder, The Long Tail Agency

How it is built

Three decisions that make the difference.

01 — Sequencing

The finish line is set first

A lending partner defines what a fundable business looks like before the cohort begins, and the program trains to that definition. Owners arrive at their application already knowing they qualify, because the whole nine weeks pointed there.

02 — Distribution

Delivered through trusted local partners

Support reaches people when it runs through organizations they already know. Local CDFIs and community groups enroll their own businesses and keep the relationship. We operate in the background.

03 — Evidence

A case file, not just a cohort

Every cohort adds documented, third-party-validated outcomes showing what these businesses achieve when built for underwriting. Over time that record does the quiet work: it shifts assumptions, and it gives the next funder something concrete to stand on.

Track record

What we have produced

Delivered with VSEDC in Los Angeles and the Washington Area Community Investment Fund in Washington, DC. A typical cohort runs 20–25 businesses.

A Launchpad cohort at Vermont Slauson Economic Development Corporation, Los Angeles

120+

Businesses enrolled

72%

Completion rate

100%

Minority / women-owned

100%

In LMI census tracts

Outcomes

What it does for the business owner

An owner and the capital readiness lead, mid-cohort

62%

Leave loan-ready

Of the businesses that complete, the share that exit meeting a lender's bar: clean books, verified revenue, documentation assembled. Not better informed. Underwritable.

45%

Average increase in revenue

The number an underwriter reads first. More revenue, and revenue that recurs, is what turns a decline into an approval.

75%

Increase in website traffic

Demand that no longer depends on who happens to walk in. The empty months start to fill.

+13%

Growth in social following

An owned audience the business keeps and can sell to again, long after the cohort ends.

Sourced from six cohorts over three years of delivery with VSEDC and WACIF.

How we measure

Completion is a defined standard, not attendance. A business counts as completed only if the owner attends seven of the nine weeks and uses at least four office hours sessions. Baseline captured at intake, exit assessment at week nine, follow-up at 90 days. Funders receive a mid-program update and a final report with outcome data, aggregated and de-identified.

In their words

The people who ran it, and the owners who lived it.

These are real partners and real owners, on camera. Two partners who delivered the program in their cities, and four business owners who came through it.

The partners who ran it

Messay Derebe

Executive Director, Anacostia Arts Center · WACIF, Washington DC

The program was intentionally designed based on years of feedback from entrepreneurs about what makes technical assistance effective. Emerging technologies often advance faster than small businesses can adapt, and low- and moderate-income entrepreneurs are frequently the last to benefit from innovation. AI is not an exception. We believed it was essential to create a supportive, non-intimidating environment where entrepreneurs could ask questions, experiment, and build confidence without feeling left behind.

A sustained learning experience. Rather than a single session on AI and digital marketing, participants met over seven sessions with the same cohort and instructors, so each session built on the last.
A trusted peer learning environment. As relationships developed, participants grew comfortable sharing their challenges, successes, and questions.
Individualized coaching. Beyond the classroom, instructors hosted weekly Expert Open Hours, giving participants dedicated one-on-one support.
Resources to put learning into action. At the conclusion, three participants received implementation grants to execute the strategies they had developed.

The result was a holistic program that combined structured instruction, peer support, individualized coaching, and implementation funding, helping entrepreneurs move beyond learning new concepts to actually changing how they market and grow their businesses.

Jessica Aquino

Program Manager, VSEDC · Los Angeles

The partner's view: what it was like to put the accelerator in front of her organization's businesses.

The owners who lived it

Tania Nguyen

Selects Active Beauty

Crystal Crawford

Liberated Eyewear, Inc.

Yendi Serwaa

Yendi Collections

Tenita Ballard

CoachTenita

Who this is for

She was never the risk. She was just never funded.

Corina Morga of CR Construction Services

Corina Morga · CR Construction Services, Baltimore

Corina Morga has run CR Construction Services out of Baltimore for years. Post-construction cleaning, floors, drywall, paint, and the labor force itself, for the region's biggest general contractors. Native American and Latina, a nonprofit founder, an MBA student at night while running crews by day.

And for years she turned work away. Not because she couldn't do it, but because construction payroll goes out weeks before a general contractor pays. Every job meant fronting a month of labor. So contracts she had earned went to companies with deeper pockets, and she got very good at running a business smaller than the one she was capable of running.

The banks declined her, and not for anything she had done. No contractor has ever failed to pay her. She was declined because she owns no building to pledge, and because an underwriter looks at a construction receivable and sees a maybe.

What Launchpad changed

She came through the accelerator's technical assistance, and the work was not motivational. It was getting her books, her backlog, and her documentation into the shape a lender actually reads.

She left loan-ready and she got funded, starting with $25,000 in bridge capital against a signed contract, enough to mobilize crews and make payroll. She delivered. She repaid.

Then she stopped saying no. Within weeks came a Montgomery County staffing contract and a $420,000 federal award at the White House. Her pipeline now runs past $1.7 million.

She never needed to be taught how to work. She needed to be made fundable.

Corina is a real participant, not a composite.

The nine weeks

Three weeks getting the house in order. Five weeks building the revenue. One week submitting.

Most programs teach one half and hope the other follows. A business with clean books and no customers isn't bankable. A business with customers and no books isn't either. Launchpad does both, in the order a lender reads them.

Phase 1 · Get bankable

The house in order

Weeks 1–4

01Week one

Orientation and baseline

Introduction to the Launchpad Accelerator and how the nine weeks build on each other.
Intake, LMI verification, and a baseline snapshot of where the business stands today.
Setting the readiness goals each owner will be measured against at week nine.

02Week two

Separating the business from you

Establishing the business as its own legal and financial entity.
Entity formation, EIN, licensing, and a dedicated business bank account.
Ending the personal-account habit that makes real revenue unreadable to a lender.

03Week three

Books a lender can read

Setting up bookkeeping that produces a clean profit and loss statement.
Organizing records so income and expenses are traceable month to month.
Building the financial picture an underwriter opens first.

04Week four

Credit, capital & what underwriters look for

Reviewing personal and business credit, and understanding what each lender weighs.
Learning the standards a loan application is actually judged against.
Assembling the document package before it is ever requested.

Phase 2 · Build the revenue

Demand that recurs

Weeks 5–8

05Week five

Digital marketing 101

Exploring the fundamentals of digital marketing for a small business.
Understanding the channels available and which ones fit this business.
Defining a customer acquisition strategy with a cost you can measure.

06Week six

AI prompting for customer acquisition

Introducing practical AI tools for marketing, content, and customer research.
Learning to prompt effectively for usable, on-brand output.
Building an AI workflow the owner can run on their own every week.

07Week seven

Content creation

Developing content that resonates with a clearly defined audience.
Producing creative assets across the formats each channel requires.
Turning the brand story into material that is ready to run.

08Week eight

Paid social and email marketing

Leveraging paid social advertising for reach and new customer acquisition.
Crafting email campaigns that convert first-time buyers and retain them.
Launching a live channel and an owned customer list the business keeps.

Phase 3 · Submit

Prepared to be bankable

Week 9

09Week nine

We prepare you to be bankable

Filing the lender package and taking the campaign live.
Walking each owner through their financing options one on one.
Mapping the marketing that carries the business from stable to scaling.

A living syllabus, not a fixed script

The nine weeks above are the backbone, not a rigid track. Every cohort begins with an intake diagnostic, and the curriculum flexes to what the businesses in the room actually need. A cohort heavy on retail gets more on paid social and inventory-driven cash flow; a cohort of service providers gets more on booking systems and recurring contracts. Because emerging tools move faster than any printed syllabus, the technology modules are refreshed each cohort to whatever is current, which is why an owner learns the AI workflow that exists this quarter, not the one from a year ago. The finish line stays fixed. The path to it adapts.

Where the program actually works

45 hours of open office hours every week, for eight straight weeks.

The class is where owners learn. Office hours are where it gets done. Building a real business takes reps, and owners need time and repeated hands-on help to work through each step and gain proficiency, not a single hour a week.

So we make ourselves available almost the entire working week, in morning, afternoon and evening blocks. Bring a bank form you don't understand, a bookkeeping file that won't balance, an ad that isn't converting, or a question you didn't want to ask in front of the group. No appointment, no minimum, no cap on how often.

What we bring to owners

Hands-on help with entity and licensing paperwork, bank account applications, and bookkeeping cleanup. We answer credit report questions, review loan document packages line by line before submission, and troubleshoot live campaigns beside them.

Why it matters to you

Completion rate is the number that decides whether a cohort produced anything. Hands-on access is the single largest driver of it, and the reason a business finishes with a filed application rather than a folder of good intentions.

Delivery model

You fund it. We operate it. Our partners deliver it.

Long Tail is compensated as program operator under a contract disclosed in full to the funder, with delivery priced against comparable providers. Administration and delivery are separate, itemized lines in every budget we submit.

Miami delivery partners

We would start the conversation here.

These are organizations already trusted in this ecosystem and already known to the Foundation. We are suggesting them as a starting point, not a shortlist. We are glad to work with any community organization or CDFI you would rather bring to the table, including partners we haven't met.

Partners for Self-Employment

A 30-year Miami CDFI and SBA intermediary lender, and a longstanding community lending partner of the Foundation. Well positioned to define the readiness standard and review our graduates for financing.

Miami Bayside Foundation

A City of Miami CDFI with deep technical assistance experience and an existing education program for historically disadvantaged owners. A natural host for a cohort.

Ascendus

A CDFI with three decades of lending to low- and moderate-income business owners and an established Southeast footprint, well suited to feeding qualified businesses into a cohort.

Also glad to work with the Community Fund of North Miami-Dade, Black Economic Development Coalition, Prospera, Neighborhood Housing Services of South Florida, or whichever partners the Foundation trusts most in the target neighborhoods.

Who delivers it

A team that has done this before, with a founder from these neighborhoods.

The accountability question matters, so here is the answer. Launchpad is led by operators with a track record of moving public and bank capital into small business outcomes, not a curriculum handed to strangers.

Dean Watkins

Program lead

Dean will lead the marketing engine of the program. He built the Digital Accelerator that drew funding participation from Wells Fargo, PNC, Citi, the Mayor's Office and LA County, by turning client outcomes into repeatable ROI reporting and program dashboards that funders could underwrite.

He brings fifteen years in marketing and seven leading teams, running full-funnel strategy across web, search, email, social and content. Before Long Tail he managed digital media partnerships for USA Today, Yahoo and Blavity, with market experience across the Caribbean and Europe.

Trey Brown

Capital readiness and system lead

Trey leads the loan-readiness side. Working with a community nonprofit that has served South LA for over forty years, he scaled small business capital readiness to 600+ businesses served, $1.5M in client grant funding and $100K in loans secured, by standardizing financial review, case notes, lender outputs and TA workflows.

He built Loan Circle, a platform that cut loan-review cost from $3,500 to under $100 by replacing fragmented CDFI workflows with automation and LLM tooling. It is the underwriting expertise that makes “loan-ready” a real standard here, not a slogan.

Donovan Brown

Paid acquisition and brand lead

Donovan leads paid acquisition and brand strategy for the program, helping business owners generate measurable demand. His experience includes building growth campaigns for national brands and co-founding The Long Tail Agency. Featured on ABC's Shark Tank, he combines entrepreneurship, e-commerce expertise, and performance marketing to help businesses attract customers efficiently and build predictable, sustainable revenue.

A bench of subject-matter experts and business coaches

The cohort is not two people lecturing. We bring in specialists across bookkeeping, credit, financing and digital growth who do two things: teach the session, and then sit down one-on-one with owners in office hours to apply it to their specific business. Instruction plus specialized individual coaching is what moves an owner from understanding a concept to changing how they run their company.

Compliance and reporting

Built so your compliance team can count it.

Every applicant is geocoded at intake using the FFIEC tool, the same instrument used in CRA examination. Recruitment concentrates in low- and moderate-income neighborhoods including Overtown, Liberty City, Little Havana, Little Haiti, Allapattah, Hialeah and North Miami, and reaches qualifying tracts across all of Miami-Dade. We report tract-level eligibility for every participant.

Your reporting package — what you receive with every cohort

Participant-level eligibility file

Every business geocoded to its census tract, with the LMI designation and the FFIEC determination attached — the exact evidence an examiner asks for, delivered per participant, not as a summary.

Business size verification

Gross annual revenue captured at intake, confirming each business falls under the $1M small-business threshold for CRA small business qualification.

Demographic reach

Owner race, gender and veteran status where voluntarily disclosed, so you can evidence reach into the communities your CRA plan and any diverse-supplier goals target.

Outcome report, quantified

Enrollment, defined-standard completion, revenue change, and financial-readiness milestones reached, written to drop straight into your CRA public file and board reporting.

Loan-readiness pipeline

The count of businesses exiting lender-ready and the applications submitted to your institution or your CDFI partner: a documented, countable pipeline of qualified borrowers, not just a training tally.

Mid-program and final cadence

A mid-cohort progress update and a final report on a fixed schedule, so the activity is documented while it happens and closes cleanly for the exam cycle.

Qualifying basis: small businesses with gross revenues under $5M

The ask

A first Miami year: three cohorts, 75 businesses, $195,000.

A nine-week cohort of 25 businesses runs $65,000 fully loaded, about $2,600 per business. Three cohorts across a year builds the volume to prove the model in Miami and, more importantly, to produce a defensible body of evidence about what these borrowers can actually clear. A single pilot cohort at $65,000 is a legitimate starting point if that is the right first step.

Think of this as readiness infrastructure rather than a standalone program. It pairs with whatever capital is being deployed, and it makes that capital work harder by ensuring the businesses reaching it are prepared for the underwriting on the other side.

A business owner working through documentation with a Launchpad lead

Start here

$65,000

One pilot cohort · 25 businesses · full reporting package

What we're proposing

$195,000

Three cohorts across year one · 75 businesses · named program rights · quarterly reporting

At scale

$260,000+

Four cohorts · 100 businesses · multi-neighborhood delivery

Structure

Three roles around the table.

Foundation & fiscal partner

The role we're inviting you into

Hold and administer the funds as fiscal home
Convene the bank and community partners
Co-design the program and its outcomes
And, if it fits your priorities, help anchor it

Anchor funder

A lead bank or corporate partner

Funds multiple cohorts across the year
Names the program
Full CRA reporting package
Staff engaged as mentors and judges
Co-authored impact report and press

Program partner

CDFIs & community orgs

Refer businesses from your portfolio
Define lending readiness criteria
Review graduates for financing
Receive outcome data on your clients

Full budget available on request, itemized by delivery, operations, administration, and contingency.

After year one

This is designed to stop needing you.

01

The pilot produces the evidence

Three cohorts generate LMI-verified, third-party-validated outcome data across 75 Miami businesses. That data packet is the asset. It is what a bank's CRA officer needs to justify a larger, recurring commitment.

02

Banks become the recurring funder

CRA obligations recur annually and are far larger than philanthropic budgets. Once the model is proven locally, bank capital is the natural engine. The Foundation's dollars are catalytic, not perpetual.

03

Partners keep the capability

Because delivery runs through local CDFIs and community organizations, the relationships, the data and the borrower pipeline stay in Miami institutions. What is built here does not leave when a grant cycle ends.

Questions funders and partners ask

Frequently asked questions

Who is this for?

Early-stage and established small businesses owned by low- and moderate-income entrepreneurs, and businesses operating in LMI communities, who have the ambition and a real product or service but can't yet clear a lender's bar. In practice that means owners with gross annual revenue under $5 million who are underbanked: sales running through a personal account, no clean financials, and revenue too unpredictable for an underwriter to read. These are viable businesses that need a bridge to being financeable, not businesses that need to be talked out of failing.

What does it cost the businesses?

Nothing, at any stage. Participation is fully funded, so there is no tuition, no materials fee, and no cost for the one-on-one coaching or the managed ad spend in the final weeks. The businesses invest their time; the funder covers everything else. Removing cost is deliberate: the owners who most need this are exactly the ones a paywall would screen out.

How are the community partners involved?

CDFIs and community organizations are the front door. They enroll businesses from their own portfolios into a cohort at no cost to them, and there is no subgrant for them to administer. Crucially, the partner keeps the client relationship the whole way through and receives the outcome data on their own businesses. We operate the program in the background; the trust and the ongoing relationship stay where they already live, with the organization the owner knows.

How do you verify CRA eligibility?

Every applicant is geocoded at intake using the FFIEC Geocoding tool, the same instrument used in CRA examination, and we capture gross annual revenue to confirm small business status. That gives us a tract-level eligibility determination for each participant, documented and retained for the full record-keeping period. The verification happens before the business starts, not reconstructed afterward, so the eligibility record is clean by the time it reaches your compliance team.

What does a funder actually receive?

A reporting package built for your CRA file and your board, not a thank-you note. It includes a participant-level eligibility file with each business geocoded to its tract, business-size verification, demographic reach where voluntarily disclosed, a quantified outcome report against a defined completion standard, and the loan-readiness pipeline, meaning the count of businesses exiting lender-ready and the applications submitted. You get a mid-program update and a final report on a fixed schedule, so the activity is documented while it happens and closes cleanly for the exam cycle.

How is completion defined?

Strictly, and on purpose. A business counts as completed only if the owner attends at least seven of the nine weeks and uses at least four office-hours sessions. We report every outcome against that bar rather than counting anyone who showed up once. A looser definition would let us publish a higher number; we would rather the figure mean something, so a funder knows a “completer” is a business that actually did the work.

What is the time commitment for a business?

Nine weeks. A weekly session plus the open office hours, which run across morning, afternoon and evening blocks so an owner running a business can find time that fits around their operations rather than around ours. The program is intensive by design: the office hours are where the paperwork gets done and the campaigns get built, and heavy use of them is the single largest driver of completion.

Can this run in our specific neighborhoods or tracts?

Yes. Because eligibility is geocoded at the individual level, we can target and document delivery to whatever assessment area or set of tracts matters to you, whether that is a specific bank's CRA footprint or the neighborhoods a foundation prioritizes. Send us the tract list and we recruit and report against it. The program is not tied to one fixed map; it goes where the qualifying businesses are.

What we're asking

Two things would move this forward.

The program is built and proven across six cohorts in Los Angeles and Washington. What it needs in Miami is a structure and a funder. If there is capital being deployed here that would work harder with a readiness pipeline attached to it, that is the conversation we most want to have.

Option one

Be the fiscal home

Hold and administer the program as fiscal sponsor for a first Miami year, and help shape how it is designed and measured. If anchoring it fits your priorities, we would welcome that too.

Option two

Point us to the right funder and partners

If the Foundation is not the check, tell us who is. An introduction to the bank or corporate partner you would bring to something like this, and to two Miami CDFIs you trust in these neighborhoods, is worth as much as a grant.

Thirty minutes is enough to know whether this fits.

Book a 30-minute call Request the full budget

The Long Tail Agency · Launchpad Accelerator · Miami-Dade County