Across small villages, Entrepreneurial Households (EHs), like Ravi’s*, are quietly redefining the meaning of a business asset. His journey began not with a business plan, but with a simple insight. He noticed the oven he’d built for his family sat idle most of the time. When a neighbor struggled to cater a wedding, he recognized its potential - and rented it out.
This mindset became his blueprint. The portable speakers he bought for a family party were soon rented out for events, and then another layer of value was added by creating a mobile announcement service for local shops. At home, he layered on again - installing a water purification unit and renting out his spacious patio for events. This approach, borrowing from the best aspects of gig and sharing economies, allows individuals to monetize their underutilized assets and skills.
This is the art of stacking: layering multiple income streams on underutilized assets. This layered approach to enterprise building is powered by the asset-leverage mindset. It’s a fundamental shift in economic thinking, moving away from a focus on asset ownership to a focus on asset leverage. A strategic choice to favor partnership and collaboration over building new, competing infrastructure from scratch. The result: modular, resilient enterprises that scale horizontally, not vertically.
For Entrepreneurial Households (EHs), like Ravi’s, this asset-leverage mindset dismantles these traditional barriers to growth, like high costs and risk of ownership. He hasn’t invested in a commercial bakery, an event company, or a water plant. Instead, he unlocked the latent value in assets he already owned or could acquire at low cost. This transforms his risk profile, giving him the agility of a startup without the weight of heavy, illiquid investments. By stacking, he can add or shed business layers as needed, building resilience precisely by owning very little.
This powerful mindset - unlocking value without the burden of heavy investment - is not just a clever strategy for households; it is the definitive model for the most innovative companies building for local economies at scale, as highlighted in our ‘Reimagining Local Economies' report. When Entrepreneurial Households leverage personal assets to stack multiple income streams, they create the foundation for asset-light platforms. These platforms serve this emerging market by providing tools that enhance the productivity of those same assets. This boost in productivity directly increases the Core Transaction Value (CTV) for the household, a metric that captures the true economic vibrancy of these households by focusing on their cash inflows as well as outflows, fueling a powerful, symbiotic loop of growth.
We see this model clearly in Latin America’s education sector with Ticmas, an Elevar Equity portfolio company. Instead of building schools, Ticmas partners with existing public and private institutions, leveraging their pre-existing infrastructure: classrooms and teachers. This frees the company to invest entirely in its core proposition: a digital learning platform that personalizes student experiences while equipping teachers with data-driven insights and streamlined tools.
In the artisan economy, platforms like Peepul Tree showcase the same asset-light DNA. Rather than building its own factories, Peepul Tree partners directly with master artisans in their own workshops across India. By leveraging their centuries-old skills and infrastructure, Peepul Tree can focus its resources on what differentiates it: storytelling, curation, and market linkage to a formal and global supply chain via technology.
For businesses aiming to create real value at scale, the lesson is clear: the future of local economies lies not in replacing existing assets, but in empowering them.
*Name changed for privacy reasons