Outside Voices: Small Business
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Susan Boyle and Small Business
Continue reading… 9 CommentsI think that even if you've been living in a cave, you've probably heard about Susan Boyle. She is the amazing singer who has become an international celebrity after her show-stopping performance on the Britain ' s Got Talent TV show.
The online success of the clip of Boyle singing is simply amazing. According to the online video measurement firm Visible Metrics, in less than five days, clips of her singing were viewed more than 47 million times and generated more than 125,000 comments.
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Small-Business Borrowing Still Hasn't Improved
Continue reading… 15 CommentsI recently took a look at National Federation of Independent Business data on the satisfaction of small-business borrowing needs and was struck by the continued downward trend. According to the NFIB data, fewer small businesses said in March that their borrowing needs had been satisfied in the previous three months than at any point since well before the recession began.
In their monthly survey of a random sample of their members (who are small-business owners), the NFIB asks respondents whether their borrowing needs were satisfied in the previous three months. In the figure below, I have produced a chart of the seasonally adjusted percentage who said yes, along with the trend line.
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Business Success Sometimes Requires a Leap of Faith
Continue reading… 1 Comment"Sometimes you just have to jump. I call it a leap of faith. You don't get to know. You've studied as much as you can, you've talked to your customers, and you just jump off."
Those were the words of my seatmate yesterday on a small plane from Oregon to California. He was sharing the story of how his business, Imagine Graphics of Eugene, Ore., has rebuilt itself in recent years with a big new building, a new name, and a lot of new business. He and his wife own it. Business doubled in 2007 and did double-digit growth last year, and he's holding that growth rate this year.
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Revitalizing Cities Also Revitalizes Businesses
Continue reading… 0 CommentsPlace Matters is a report from the think tank Center for American Progress that describes the importance of regional or local industrial clusters to economic growth and the creation of new jobs and companies.
Industrial clusters are geographic areas where groups of similar companies concentrate. The best-known cluster is Silicon Valley, but industrial clusters large and small exist in many places around the world.
The consulting firm McKinsey has released an interesting map of global industrial clusters. The map ranks clusters by size and growth rates and illustrates the growing number and diversity of industrial clusters.
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Statistics Can Deceive When It Comes to Small-Business Jobs
Continue reading… 0 CommentsSo I'd say that I'm drowning in information lately, except that 1) you wouldn't be very sympathetic, because you are too; and 2) it's not information that oftenit's often half information or fake information, or merely good intentions.
Surveys and Statistics Vs. Truth
We forget so easily that when a survey shows X percent of respondents prefer Y over Z, that doesn't make it true. That means only that this survey, with this group of respondents, came out that way.
Maybe you took statistics in college, maybe not; and maybe you did but (like me) you've forgotten most of it. Remember this, though: If it doesn't start with a random sample, it's not likely to mean that much.
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Are Nonemployer Businesses Really Entrepreneurial?
Continue reading… 0 CommentsOne of the difficult statistics for entrepreneurship researchers to understand is the vast majority of people who run their own businesses but have no employees. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, in 2002 (the latest year for which data are available publicly), there were 23.3 million firms in operation in the United States. However, only 5.7 million of them (24.4 percent) were employer firms. That is, three quarters of U.S. entrepreneurs had no employees.
Moreover, most of these nonemployer businesses are truly tiny. According to the Census Department data, U.S. firms generated $22.8 trillion in revenue in 2002. But less than 3.4 percent of this revenue came from nonemployer firms. The average revenue of a nonemployer firm in 2002 was only $45,000.
