We bring you new microbusiness research!

Posted on | February 3, 2010 | 2 Comments

(Photo by US Army Africa, via Flickr)

Precisely two years ago this month, a consulting firm called Microbusiness Strategies LLC launched a series of interactive events called IssuesLive.

It was billed as a “national dialogue and needs assessment” for microbusinesses, with said dialogue to be taking place between said microbusiness owners, service providers, vendors, policy makers and media types.

Along with the actual events — which were organized in such a way as to allow in-person participation or online participation — participants were asked to take a (rather lengthy) poll as part of the registration process.

The resulting data offered a real snapshot of microbusinesses and their owners, what their challenges are, what policy issues they care about and what kinds of things they overcame as a startup.

The research report has finally been released, today, by the Microbusiness Research Institute (a division of Wahpmreneur Publishing, Inc., my publishing company). You can download a copy of the paper here.

The author of the paper is yours truly; it has taken up quite a bit of my time and energy through the first month of the year. I’m proud of the result.

It was the writing of this paper and the observations I was able to make about the IssuesLive events that brought me to realize how poorly microbusinesses fit into the infrastructure of the U.S. economy. That, by itself, is a pretty significant observation and certainly one that is worth further cogitation.

A few other major findings:

• Microbusiness owners identified “Financing/capital” as the top policy issue facing them, followed by the economy and health care.
• When asked was would help their firms become more successful, the issue that generated the broadest response from microbusinesses was taxes. However, while 48% of respondents want to pay lower taxes, more of them (54%) felt that tax simplification was extremely important and still more of them (62%) believe the tax code needs to be fairer
• Microbusiness owners identified financial issues as the primary barrier to entry into business ownership, naming “lack of consistent income” and “lack of access to startup capital” as the top two challenges that got in their way when they launched their firms.
• The most important current challenges to survey respondents were time and money.

Another thing that pleased me about this paper is that it gave me an excuse to rifle through my archives for my lit review. After reviewing all the researching I’ve been writing about for the past few years, I was able to see that we’ve actually learned a lot about microbusinesses over the years. It’s just that the information had to be teased out of larger research projects because almost nobody researches just microbusinesses.

Anway, I hope you get a chance to go check it out. It is my hope that this initial paper will spur further research. That will be a very good thing.

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