A Walk Down Main Street
What’s Really Happening in the Small Business World?
For PEOs, it’s hard to know what is really happening within any given small business.
It’s possible to collect data from small businesses about their optimism, and conversely, pessimism, towards such things as new job creation or the ability to fill existing jobs, plans for capital outlays and increasing inventories, expansion, and the outlook for sales. Trends in these areas provide a broad context and can tell PEOs a lot about their clients and potential clients.
So too can data that aggregates information from small business owners about the challenges they face from industry and economic issues, product demand, tighter consumer credit, and laws and regulations. Such data provide insight into the environment in which clients and potential clients find themselves operating.
One of the most important statistics for PEOs is the state of small business employment. Tracking small business employment not only indicates how the economy is performing, but also takes the pulse of small business, because in a small company, employees are pretty much everything.
More telling than economic data and statistics, however, are narratives from real small business owners, revealing their every-day struggles and challenges, in their own words. This feature presents narratives from nine small businesses across the country, of different sizes and in different industries. These narratives can help PEOs interpret the economic data and statistics, and really see how it filters down to real life in the small business world.
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