Small Business Trends

Having an uncertain income is one of the things that people find frightening about going into business for themselves. Unlike a salary earned from working for someone else, future business profits are hard to predict. And people like to be able to forecast what they will earn in coming years.

While the the unpredictability of business income is something that Read More

Everybody loves lists — or at least, everybody who reads blogs, so we are told. I don’t do lists very often because it never seems that the information I write about fits well into the format.  This month’s Research Roundup post breaks the mold.

Lists take up a lot of space, though, so I’m only going Read More

Here’s a fact that should worry those people who are relying on entrepreneurs to solve this country’s unemployment problems.

Recently released Census Bureau data shows that start-ups account for a shrinking share of U.S. job creation. A report analyzing the Census Bureau’s business dynamics data shows that the start-up job creation rate declined precipitously during the Great Recession, Read More

The US Small Business Administration (SBA) recently conducted focus groups to learn what entrepreneurs, investors and others believe we need to do to enhance entrepreneurship in America. One of their findings was that we need to improve entrepreneurship education in our K-12 schools.

While it’s hard to argue with “improving education” for anything, this Read More

Universities and federal laboratories often license their inventions to industry as a way to commercialize those technical advances. Which generate higher royalties?

Recently released data from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the Association of University Technology Managers (AUTM) indicates that the average university invention brought in significantly more in licensing income than Read More

How do women-owned businesses differ from companies owned by men? Not as much as they used to, according to a recent study from the SBA’s Office of Advocacy. “Business ownership no longer can be analyzed simply on the basis of the owner’s gender; businesses owned by women and men more and more share the same general development patterns,” write the Read More

Our elected officials give disproportionate attention to the smallest small businesses when evaluated from the perspective of economic impact. Microbusinesses account for a tiny fraction of GDP and employment, yet our elected officials trip over each other trying to help and praise them. Why are micro businesses so important to policy makers?

I think the answer lies in the Read More

If there’s one statistic that typifies the problems that the venture capital industry has faced in recent years it is IPO yield – the number of initial public offerings divided by the number of companies financed five years earlier. This figure captures the industry average share of portfolio companies that exit in the most lucrative way for investors.

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Many people think buying a business is expensive. But, actually, the typical private company sells at a low price.

According to BIZCOMPS, Business Valuation’s data base of private company sales, the median price of the 12,022 companies sold since 1995 on which Business Valuation has data was $166,000, less than half of one year’s revenue. Read More

The Great Recession took a bite out of the value of the business equity of U.S. households that own small companies. Of course, the fact that the biggest recession in a generation caused a decline in households’ business equity holdings is probably intuitively obvious. But until recently the size of that decline has been unclear.

A recent Federal Reserve Read More