Small businesses are demanding; every business owner knows this. It takes a tremendous amount of energy and focus to get a business off the ground, and then it takes even more energy and focus to keep it running.
While focus is great, working in the trenches can limit our vision after awhile. It’s good to step back now and then to look at the larger picture.
Of course, you can—and should—connect with other business owners one-on-one, but it’s also good to step back even further and see how entire groups of small business owners are faring. That’s the benefit of small business surveys. These high-level snapshots can show where you stand compared to your peers, and what strategies and tactics are working best for them.
So take a look below—there are a ton of insights here. Hopefully, you’ll find some reassurance that your business is on the right track. And who knows . . . maybe you’re even ahead of the game.
Yelp’s “Small Business Pulse”
This second annual survey of 1,100 businesses reveals the same thing that almost every other small business survey has found this year: Small businesses are optimistic about the future.
Yelp reports that nearly 90% of survey respondents “expect their business’s revenue will grow in 2017 by an average of 31%.”
Yelp asked small business owners what they think President Trump’s top priorities should be (No. 1 is reducing the regulatory burden for small businesses), and their top challenges for the coming year. The survey also found out how business owners collect feedback from their customers.
Endurance International Group’s “Move Over Main Street: Home Is Where The Business Is”
This survey slants towards smaller businesses, aka “microbusinesses.” According to the results, 90% of these types of small business owners work from home at least some of the time.
Endurance found that while time management is one of the biggest challenges facing people who work from home, 62% of respondents say they actually get more done when they work outside of the office. The survey also quizzed small business owners on:
- What they would outsource if they could
- Social media platforms they liked most
- Marketing tactics they believed were most likely to help them grow their business
WASP Barcode Technologies’ “State of Small Business Report”
This survey/infographic of 1,100 U.S. small business owners is published by my company, and it covers almost every aspect of running a business, including:
- What near-term growth small businesses expect.
- What a small business’s top challenges are.
- Whether small businesses are hiring, and how many people they’re hiring.
- Information on marketing goals, strategies and most-used tactics.
- How small businesses use their websites.
- Whether small businesses track assets, and if so, which systems are used for tracking those assets
Vistaprint’s “Small Business Consumer Expectations Report”
Have you updated your website lately? Like within the last month? Vistaprint’s survey really drives home how important an updated website is.
Of the consumers Vistaprint surveyed, 49.7% say the No. 1 thing that leaves them with a bad impression of a small business website is “outdated contact information.” So what qualifies as “outdated”? It depends on the customer, but 41.6% of respondents said that anything more than a month is outdated.