Support your local small businesses whenever possible! They are very important to the success of our economy.
In case you didn’t realize it, small businesses are an important part of the backbone of our economy. I would like to thank all of our “small business” customers for what you do on a daily basis. Government involvement in business matters doesn’t always make it easy for small businesses to be profitable. In fact I heard that in some states they are requiring summertime lemonade stands to have a business permit. Hopefully our local, state and national leaders will begin to recognized the importance of the small business owner and their contributions to society. Here are some interesting facts about small businesses:
From the website of the Small Business Administration:
How important are small businesses to the U.S. economy?
Small firms:
- Represent 99.7 percent of all employer firms.
- Employ just over half of all private sector employees.
- Pay 44 percent of total U.S. private payroll.
- Have generated 64 percent of net new jobs over the past 15 years. (note to the politicians out there!)
- Create more than half of the nonfarm private gross domestic product (GDP).
- Hire 40 percent of high tech workers (such as scientists, engineers, and computer programmers).
- Are 52 percent home-based and 2 percent franchises.
- Made up 97.3 percent of all identified exporters and produced 30.2 percent of the known export value in FY 2007.
- Produce 13 times more patents per employee than large patenting firms; these patents are twice as likely as large firm patents to be among the one percent most cited.