FORBES Business
For most people who start a one-person business, riches don’t follow. The U.S. Census Bureau’s recently released annual report on “non-employer” businesses found that there were 22.5 million “nonemployer firms” in 2011. They had average revenues of $44,000. That’s in the ballpark of the average annual wage in the U.S. of $45,790, though, of course, any overhead the owners must pay comes out of their revenue.
But for some of these one-man or one-woman shops, running a microbusiness is very lucrative. If you’re thinking about going into business for yourself, and worry about how you’ll pay the bills or support your dependents, you may find these statistics about non-employer firms inspiring. Typically, the businesses in this study were sole proprietorships, but a small percentage were partnerships and corporations.
Photo credit: Wikipedia
* 1.6 million owners rang up sales in the the $100,000 to $249,999 range (up from 1.5 million in 2010)
* 484, 479 had sales from $249,000 to $499,000 (up from 453,694 in 2010)
* 209,415 had sales between $500,000 to $999,999 (down from 198,755 in 2010).
* 26,744 had sales between $1 million and $2.49 million (up from 24,945 in 2010)
* 1,723 had sales between $2.5 million and $4.99 million (up from 1,618 in 2010)
*368 had sales of $5 million or more (down from 442 in 2010).
As you’ll see, the numbers of nonemployer firms in most of these categories are rising, and there was a significant bump in those breaking the $1 million mark.
It doesn’t surprise me. I’ve been noticing an increase in million dollar, one-person and home-based businesses in my reporting, on a case by case basis, so I was curious about what kind of work these solopreneurs are doing on a broader scale.
The folks who are really raking it in, in the $5 million or more category, work in 3 categories, according to the new report: Almost all of them (317) run finance and insurance firms. There’s also a small subset (45 people) who work in arts and entertainment. (Talk about a dream career!) And four of them work in retail.
At the next highest revenue tier, from $2.5 million to $4.99 million, the retail category had the greatest number of businesses, with 494 represented. In second place were professional, scientific and technical services, with 328 firms.
In the 1 million to $2.49 million range, the top category, by far, was professional, scientific and technical services, with 6,708 firms. Retailbusinesses came in second, with 2,595 represented.
Obviously, the numbers of such firms are very small, but if these folks can break these revenue milestones, so can others.
If you’re hoping to match a six-figure corporate salary in a one-person business, you’ll probably find the data for these three categories most interesting:
No comments:
Post a Comment