Small Business Trends

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

Life in Research Land has been very, very slow for a few months now, but, for at least a few minutes, that’s going to change. The big story in this month’s research is that the Census Bureau has released the nonemployer data for 2009 (which I have been eagerly awaiting, even if nobody else has).

But first …

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Since a lot of folks (primarily policymakers) seem to think that small businesses don’t need anything at all but access to debt financing in order to thrive, it’s interesting that we have a couple of highly relevant bits of nongovernmental research on the subject this month.

But, if all small business owners need is access to debt financing, then it Read More

“Employee engagement” is a hot buzzword in the HR world today—but unlike some buzzwords, this is one every small business owner should care about. As the recession cut into salaries and increased workloads, especially at small companies, it’s become increasingly challenging to keep employees engaged.

The recently released Employee Engagement Report 2011 from leadership development firm BlessingWhite has Read More

Technology exists to help us leverage our resources and do more with less. In fact, one of the best things about technology is how it helps ushandle more business in less time (that thing that we can’t get back and always need more of). At first, new technology means a greater time commitment because there’s a learning curve.  But the Read More

You might be a little surprised to see how very little the recession affected the proportions of different-sized businesses. Or you may not … but I was. But the latest research does suggest that, whatever these trends towards smaller firms mean, they don’t seem to be going away.

New Firm Size Data

This month, we had one of my annual Read More

How does your small business’s use of technology compare to other SMBs? A new study of small and midsized businesses’ use of IT has sought to find out. Here are some results from Cloud Computing and the Role of IT Professionals in Small- to Mid-Sized Businesses, a just-released survey of more than 500 SMB decision-makers by Zoomerang Online Read More