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May
7
How to Find The Number of Small Businesses in a County or Zip Code
May 7, 2007 | Anita Campbell
I received an email from a reader (thanks, Brian!) thanking me for my recent briefs on finding market data. So, I thought I would spend a few minutes on how to use the Census.gov website to find market data of your own.
Let’s say you want to find out how many small businesses there are in a particular zip code or in a U.S. county, state or metropolitan region.
Perhaps you need this information to determine whether there is enough market potential to expand your B2B product or service to a new geographic region. Or maybe you want to decide where to locate a new sales office. This kind of data even can be used to carve out territories for sales reps or franchise locations.
The first step is to go to the County Business Patterns section of the Census website.
Click on the first link in the center of the page: View in Hypertext Tables (html)
Use the pull-down menus to choose a geographic area. Or you can also search by zipcode and metro region.
Just keep drilling down. Eventually you will get to a page with tables of information by industry (rows) and establishment size (columns), for whatever geographic area you are trying to measure. Click on the “detail” buttons and you can drill down even further into detailed information.
This information is downloadable to an Excel spreadsheet (just click on the button at the bottom of any page that says “save as CSV file”).
The final point to remember about Census.gov data is what is not included in these numbers. The County Business patterns does not include information on government workers, self-employed individuals or agriculture.
Comments
3 Comments so far
Fantastic! Very useful information that can really help you target your marketing efforts, too. Thanks for posting it.
I found this information useful as well. Thanks for the links.
This is also useful for considering a move, especially if moving into a small town. Will there be enough business around me to survive?
Thanks for sharing, Anita!