Small businesses’ watchdog in Washington D.C., the Office of Advocacy within the U.S. Small Business Administration, gives 10 reasons for Californians to send small businesses a valentine today:

10. Small businesses make up 99.2 percent of all California employers.

9. Small businesses create more than 50 percent of America’s private non-farm gross domestic product.

8. Small patenting firms produce 13 times more patents per employee than large patenting companies do.

7. The 3,675,700 small businesses in California are located in every community and neighborhood.

6. Small businesses employ 52.5 percent of California’s non-farm private sector workers.

5. Home-based businesses account for 52 percent of all small businesses.

4. Small businesses are 97 percent of America’s exporters and produce 28.6 percent of all export value.

3. California saw an estimated 115,684 new small employers start up in the last year for which data are available.

2. There are approximately 957,200 minority-owned businesses and 870,500 women-owned businesses in California, and almost all of them are small businesses.

1. The latest figures show that small businesses create 60 to 80 percent of America’s net new jobs.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 14th, 2008 at 4:00 am and is filed under Economy, Entrepreneurship. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.