While April showers have brought wonderful May flowers in our backyard, entrepreneurial economy is not blossoming going into the summer.
Here are some highlights from various indicators:
- 71 percent of small business owners still believe the United States economy is in a recession according to results of the 2012 U.S. Bank Small Business Annual Survey
- The SurePayroll Scorecard data shows that month-over-month, hiring and paycheck size show little change, both down 0.1%, while year-over-year, hiring is down 1.5% and paychecks are down 1.1%. Optimism among small business owners is also down from last month.
- Intuit’s Small Business Revenue Index shows that revenues have been growing slowly, while their Small Business Employment Index shows that employment is growing slowly, by 0.2 percent in May.
- Data from nominees to Ernst & Young’s Entrepreneur of the Year program, shows that over the last two years employment growth in this select group of high-growth companies was 31% job growth. While this sounds promising, these businesses are hard-wired for growth, so in many ways these figures are not as robust as I would hope to see.
- William C. Dunkelberg at NFIB said this today about their latest small business survey, “May was a stagnant month for employment in the small-business sector, with the net change in employment per firm, seasonally adjusted coming in at ‘0’.”