We hear about small businesses being critical to the health of our economy, but it seems that the real action may well be taking place in the Micro-Business sector. Since I am right up to my eyeballs in at least one micro-business, I am going to devote a few posts to this interesting phenomena.
A micro-business is one which does less than $1 million in business per year. The majority of these business are home-based businesses (HBBs)and they make up an unknown percentage of the small businesses that are tracked by the Small Business Administration.
I have not been able to find recent micro-business figures for the entire US yet, but in the pre-internet days of 1992, home-based business contributed $314 Billion dollars, or 11 percent to the economy.
With today’s internet tools and online payment systems like PayPal, a micro-business can do business as easily as any large corporation. I wonder if the micro-business sector might not be contributing as much as 18% of the economy this year?
For more recent reports you can see how important the micro-business sector is in Arizona, Texas, and Australia and more in Australia.
One of the most interesting indicators was this article about American Express making inroads in the micro-business market. If there is enough of a market to interest AMEX, the micro-business sector should be hitting the radar soon.
This could provide some satisfaction to some of my blogging friends who already operate micro-businesses. On the other hand, running a micro-business is much like blogging. You do it because it’s important to you or you feel compelled to do it. It’s not something you feel like bragging about.
Next post – What is driving the growth of these micro-businesses? The reasons are fascinating.
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