10 Interesting Facts About American Small Businesses

 
Are you an entrepreneur or small business owner? Do you support entrepreneurs and small businesses in America?

According to recent research performed by the Office of Advocacy, Small Business, there are several good reasons to patronize small businesses, and there may be more opportunities to do so in the coming years. 

Small business owners tend to be environmentally friendly, creative, highly innovative, and well-educated. They also create the majority of new jobs in the US every year.

For research purposes, The Office of Advocacy, Small Business Administration (SBA), defines a small business as one having fewer than 500 employees. All statistics provided in this article are from their website: www.sba.gov.

1. More Americans are becoming self-employed as entrepreneurs, freelancers, contractors, or owners of microbusinesses, although conventional careers still prevail.
   
   Typically 7% of Americans are self-employed. Ed Potter, President of the Employment Policy Foundation, predicts this rate could grow to as high as 10% in the next few years.
   
   This seemingly small percentage actually equates to millions of workers in a labor force of just 146 million. Source: Dallas Morning News, “Self-employed, freelance workers on the rise in new job market”
    
2. Small businesses are environmentally friendly. They are typically an active part of their local community and they also provide innovation.
   
   Economic research suggests that small businesses innovate at twice the rate of large businesses, which usually results in environmentally friendly products and technologies.
   Source: Advocacy
    
3. Small businesses tend to be clean businesses. Over one-half of the 22.9 million small businesses in the United States are home-based sales and service-oriented business, which means they have little potential for harming the environment.
    
4. People with higher education levels are more likely to become entrepreneurs, and they are also more likely to start a business employing even more people.
    
5. Small businesses represent 99.7% of all employer firms, and they employ 50% of all private sector employees, including 39% of high tech workers such as scientists, engineers, and computer workers.
    
6. Small businesses create 60-80% of net new jobs each year.
    
7. Small businesses generate more over half of non-farm, private GDP.
    
8. There is a major correlation between national economic growth and the level of entrepreneurial activity in prior years, according to the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM).
    
9. Two-thirds of all present-day college students intend to become entrepreneurs at some point in their careers.
    
10. Small businesses produce 13 - 14 times more patents per employee than large companies, and these patents are twice as likely as those by the large companies to be among the top one percent most cited.

About the author:

Susan Dunn, MA coaches entrepreneurs and small business owners to succeed providing web strategies, Internet marketing, emotional intelligence training, article-writing and submission, ebook editing, and Internet launch, web design, and copy writing. Visit her at www.webstrategies.cc and www.susandunn.cc.

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