Generally Speaking What is a Small Business
A Home Business Article Contributed by George Baker
What is a Small Business?
What is a small business? Generally speaking most of us think of a small business as the mom and pop neighborhood store on the corner or Uncle Herman who is a certified public accountant and fills out the families tax forms once a year. The legal definition of a small business is as varied as there are businesses. A small business can have one employee or up to a thousand or more. It can gross one dollar in sales to over twenty million dollars.
Government regulatory agencies have set up a myriad of guidelines to define the small business today. Some so flexible and open to interpretation that it would seem as if all corporations could qualify as a small business. In general we will talk of the small business as one having less than one hundred employees.
You Can Find Small Business is Everywhere
Small business is the backbone of the American economy. The small farmer who has the produce stand on the side of the road, the mechanic down the street that fixes your car, the florist on the corner or the woman who bakes your daughters wedding cake are prime examples of small business that we rely on every day. The sign over the gas station may say Exxon but it's Mr. Jones who owns and runs the station where we fill up our tanks.
What about the paper carrier who delivers the newspaper to your front door every morning? He's probably not an employee of the newspaper but an independent contractor who owns the route. In fact he probably owns several routes and hires others to deliver the papers for him. Walk into the grocery store. See all the cupcakes and individually wrapped pies sitting on the shelf. They were made by a large corporation but most likely another small businessman owns the distribution end of the process.
Large corporations are shifting more and more to employing independent contractors to handle aspects of their business such as distribution and sales. It's a real shot in their bottom line by using the independent contractor. They generally pay a flat rate for the service that can be predicted each month. They also don't have to worry about offering a benefits package, which is a huge expense for corporations.
Opportunities for the Small Business
The large corporations of the world that get blamed for running the mom and pop businesses out of town are in reality opening up more opportunities for the small businessman. As I touched on before opportunities abound for the small businessman today. With the proliferation of independent contractors the market place has opened avenues of opportunity that didn't exist before. Take the example of the paper carrier that I mentioned before.
I have a friend who took on a paper route years ago to supplement his weekly paycheck. At that time he was considered an employee of the newspaper and made just above minimum wage. Not long ago the paper decided it was getting out of the distribution end of the business. He was offered an opportunity to buy the route and now he owns and operates several routes and his secondary paycheck turned into his primary income grossing much more than he made working the two jobs.
