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May
8
How to Discover Which Industries Have the Most Small Businesses
May 8, 2007 | Anita Campbell
If you are selling to small businesses and want to find out which industries have the most small businesses, the following tutorial on U.S. government statistics can help.
To get the full picture, you need to look at two different data sets:
(1) businesses with employees (called “employer” businesses in government parlance);
(2) businesses without employees (called “nonemployer” businesses).
If you want to include data on farms, you’d have to add a third place to look. Farm data is kept track of separately. However, most small business statistics do not include farm data. For purposes of this tutorial, we will ignore farm data.
The U.S. Small Business Administration and the U.S. Census Bureau collaborate on business data by size and industry. You can find the data you are looking for on both websites, in different formats.
However, I find that the best place to start is the U.S. Small Business Administration’s Office of Advocacy page on Firm Size Data. The SBA’s page gives the best overview of the data, in the most understandable language. It also contains direct links to Excel spreadsheet data you want.
Once on the SBA’s page, there are two large spreadsheets you will want to download:
- Spreadsheet of nonemployer businesses (for self-employed individuals)
- Spreadsheet for employer businesses (i.e., those with employees at some point during the year) — this document has multiple tabs and you want the tab labeled “us04_n6″.
Once you have downloaded both sets of data, you will need to combine the two sets of data if you wish to get an accurate picture of all 25+ million small businesses in the United States.
What this data will tell you is the total counts, by employment size and by industry, of businesses in the United States. In other words, you will be able to tell which industries have the most small businesses. You even will be able to break it down by employee size.
OK, lesson done for the day.
Comments
1 Comment so far
Lesson well-done. Some really interesting reading here. Agree, SBA page does give the best overview.