A jazz musician by trade, Curtis Forbes received an invaluable piece of advice from his music school mentor decades ago that’s guided his professional journey ever since: Sometimes you must make the gig where there is no gig.
“It really struck me,” he recalls. “How else do you tell somebody to go be an entrepreneur? You can’t wait for an opportunity to appear—you create it, even if the conditions aren’t perfect.”
Forbes is the founder and CEO of MustardHub, an engagement and retention platform designed specifically for startups and small businesses. Besides promoting participation and accountability through collaboration and recognition, the scalable platform offers predictive intelligence that identifies workplace factors like attrition risk and promotional readiness to help small businesses reduce churn rates and build workplace cultures that last. While the platform is currently available as an open beta, most clients opt for MustardHub’s embedded solution, which is tracking 4,000 accounts by mid-January.
Forbes’s entrepreneurial journey emerged from the 15 years he spent on the jazz circuit, playing guitar and upright bass nationwide after graduating from Berklee College of Music. Having taught his own students along the way, he founded Forbes Music, a music education company that combines in-home and online lessons, in 2001. Things hummed along for years until the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.
