What the registry doesn’t show: who small business owners really are
- Segment
- Small business development and support
- Topic
- Entrepreneur profile, background and needs
- Method
- Nationwide quantitative telephone survey with more than 10,000 interviews
- Status
- Active
- Date opened
- ••/••/••••
- Main activity
- ••••••••••••
- Size
- Small business
- Is it operating?
- Why was it opened?
- What is holding back growth?
- Why did it stop?
The starting point
A registry tells you a business exists. It doesn’t tell you whether it’s up and running, why it was started, what’s holding it back or why it closed.
For an organization that supports small businesses nationwide, that difference matters. From a distance, small business owners look like a single audience. Up close, they include people who started a business for independence and people who did it out of necessity, newcomers and veterans, those who are growing and those who have closed their doors.
The organization needed to understand what happens after someone decides to start a business, and where the barriers and opportunities lie in helping them move forward.
Also hearing from those who stopped
- Operating
- Closed the businessusually left out
- Never actually startedusually left out
One design choice defined the study: it didn’t only talk to active business owners. It also included people who had closed their business and people who never really got started.
This group is usually left out of surveys, but it explains as much as the people who keep going. Why they stopped, what kept them from starting or restarting, and whether they’d try again all show where support arrives too late, or not at all.
How we did it
The survey was conducted by phone, with more than 10,000 interviews nationwide. That made it possible to reach entrepreneurs in every region, including smaller towns and rural areas.
- 10,000+telephone interviews
- Nationwideevery region, including smaller towns and rural areas
- 3questionnaire themes
- 3angles of analysis
QuestionnaireThe questionnaire covered three themes:
- 1
Background: profile, motivation for starting the business, formalization and sources of income.
- 2
Operations: winning customers, financial management, credit, suppliers, and sales to businesses and the public sector.
- 3
Training: what business owners need to learn, how they prefer to learn and how much time they have for it.
From answers to profiles
The study’s value lay less in the data collection than in what was done with the data. Three types of analysis came together:
Segmentation: business owners were grouped into profiles with distinct situations and needs, instead of being treated as an average.
Comparison with the registry: what people reported was checked against registration data, revealing the gap between the business on paper and the real one.
Regional analysis: comparing regions showed that the same kind of support doesn’t carry the same weight everywhere in the country.
What changed for the customer
The study shaped two of the organization’s priorities: training, with topics and formats tailored to what each profile needs and can realistically keep up with, and communication, with messages and approaches designed for business owners at different stages.
- 1TrainingTopics and formats by profile
- 2CommunicationMessages by entrepreneur stage
A program designed for the average business owner risks serving no real business owner at all.
Supporting small businesses starts with recognizing they’re not a single audience, and that understanding the ones who stopped helps design better support for the ones who keep going.