This week (2/26/11) I’m speaking to the friendly folks at the annual conference of the Small Business Institute on the topic of Building Business Value.  Small businesses have a favored spot in American culture.  According to theUS Small Business Administration (SBA), these businesses make up an incredible array of eye-popping statistics.  Small businesses:

1. Represent 99.7 percent of all employer firms
2. Employ just over half of all private sector employees
3. Pay 44 percent of total U.S. private payroll
4. Have generated 64 percent of net new jobs over the past 15 years
5. Create more than half of the non-farm private gross domestic product (GDP)
6. Hire 40 percent of high tech workers (such as scientists, engineers, and computer programmers)
7. Are 52 percent home-based and 2 percent of franchises
8. Made up 97.3 percent of all identified exporters and produced 30.2 percent of the known export value in FY 2007
9. Produce 13 times more patents per employee than large patenting firms and according toGallup,
10. Are still held in high esteem by most Americans.

 

In fact, 66% of Americans have confidence in small businesses while 19% of Americans have confidence in big businesses.

Doug Conant, current CEO of Campbell’s, once told me that it was important for CEO’s of big businesses to think like small business owners from time to time.  Sounds like he was aware of these Top 10 reasons before most of us.