Empowering Small Businesses in Our Backyard

We’re thrilled to announce that Intuit is investing in a partnership with the Los Angeles Urban League (LAUL) to support diverse small businesses in Los Angeles through access to Intuit products, business coaching, and personalized expert business consulting for a year. 

Intuit employees recently sat down with one of Los Angeles’ most influential organizations dedicated to helping multicultural communities secure economic self-reliance, parity, power, and civil rights through advocacy and programs. For over 100 years, the Los Angeles Urban League (LAUL) has promoted economic empowerment through education, job training, housing and community development, workforce development, and more. 

Given Intuit’s presence in Los Angeles, we understand the importance of working toward helping this community prosper. Intuit has invested more than $1 million in Los Angeles-area school districts including Inglewood, Compton, and Los Angeles Unified School Districts to develop financial literacy and job readiness programs to empower the next generation of students to learn about finances and entrepreneurship.  

Fulfilling our mission to power prosperity around the globe begins in the communities we serve. 

We learned that LAUL facilitates workshops for small business owners and eventually rewards participants with Intuit products too. It became clear that the change Intuit can make is rooted not in just providing our suite of products, but also in ensuring that small business owners in Los Angeles have the expertise to leverage the incredible expert network we provide.

Because of our shared desire to support small and diverse businesses, our teams explored ways we could connect small businesses with our AI-driven platform and the power of our expert network.

The new initiative, called Intuit IDEAS (Invest, Develop, Empower, Accelerate, and Scale), will leverage Intuit’s AI -driven platform and human experts with the know-how and advocacy of LAUL to support Los Angeles-area Black and Latino small business owners to help them grow, scale and accelerate their businesses.

The businesses that are selected will be assigned a counselor to facilitate their receipt of accounting, marketing, credit monitoring, and tax preparation software. The cohort will represent a geographically diverse cross-section of Los Angeles County with a focus on diverse businesses that are women, Black, Latino or veteran-owned. 

Between 25–30 diverse small businesses in Los Angeles will be identified to participate in the program. Intuit IDEAS will include: support with business compliance, back-office bookkeeping, tax prep, and email marketing. The goal is to improve business functioning, efficiency, earnings, and capital readiness of the businesses after 12 months. 

Participants will also receive business consulting support from LAUL and, at the conclusion of the program, a $10,000 grant from Intuit to help each participant scale their business.

This is something that we’ve never done at Intuit. For our team to take this step is only possible because LAUL is a partner that allows us to have truly meaningful impact in Los Angeles.