There are a number of statistics which track the births and deaths of small businesses in America.
We have even used some of these for earlier blog posts on our own website as you can see here.
In doing research for our latest blog post I came across some research results being referred to by Jim Clifton, the CEO of Gallup. Yes that’s the same Gallup that does surveys and polls on hugely important subjects and trends.
The data is this:
Since the numbers of new businesses and business closures have been being measured (1977) new businesses have always outnumbered business closures by at least 100,000 or more every year.
Since 2008 the number of businesses that are opening in the U.S. per year plummeted and the number of business closures in the U.S. continued to rise. The most recent numbers coming in put us at a deficit of 70,000. Meaning that for the first time since we have been measuring these numbers, more businesses are closing than are opening. 70,000 more closures than business openings is a very unhealthy trend to say the least.
Source: https://www.gallup.com/businessjournal/180431/american-entrepreneurship-dead-alive.aspx
While there are many opinions and theories about what happened in 2008 that cause the so-called “Great Recession”, one thing is abundantly clear, not enough people are successfully starting and running businesses.
As most businesses failures have to do with a lack of knowledge or application of knowledge on how to market, sell and deliver their product, training new and existing business owners is now an urgent nation-wide priority.
Let’s also now look at the fact that since 2008 some very major things have happened
In 2008 Facebook passed MySpace in the number of active users (approx 100 million) and hasn’t looked back since (last count was 1.23 billion active users).
2009 was when Facebook introduced the “like” button.
Since 2008 Twitter has grown from 6 million users to 320 million.
Instagram and Pinterest didn’t exist in 2008 and now have 300 million and 47 million users respectively.
This is not even taking into account all of the new and changed advertising opportunities with online platforms such as Google AdWords, sponsored posts on Instagram and Facebook and many more.
If it isn’t clear yet, the conclusion you should be drawing here is that there are now more channels to reach customers than ever before. But that means you can also fail on more channels than ever before.
You need to get yourself educated on the current marketing and sales tools available to you. We have seen the number of potential avenues to reach customers double, triple and keep on expanding by the day. This doesn’t mean you have to use all of them, but it does mean that your customers are now potentially receiving ads and marketing communications from many more sources than ever before in history. You need to know which ones are going to be effective for you and how best to use them in your business.
This doesn’t mean you go find a “guru” and dump tons of money into having them handle it for you. It means you need to get educated on what your options are, what the pros and cons are to all of these new platforms and make sure that your business strategy takes into account which ones you are going to be using to ensure your success.
This country was built on the idea that everyone has a fair and equal chance for success and that if you work hard, the sky’s the limit. Don’t waste that chance through unintentional ignorance.
Get educated and get successful, (or more successful). You’ll find advice and tips all throughout this blog and there are many other sources. If you have a question, you can always write us and ask, we’d be happy to help, even if it’s just to steer you in the right direction.
Do you have a specific question or topic about marketing and sales you would like to see explained simply? Write it in the comment section below.
