Over the last few years, the national economy has improved significantly, and brought many small businesses back onto a more positive standing. That, in turn, has led to the creation of many new small business jobs, and now, it seems that some of the country’s smallest businesses are the ones driving the most hiring activity.
In March alone, small businesses with between one and 49 employees hired roughly 108,000 workers across the country, according to the latest ADP Small Business Report. This marked an improvement from the 103,000 seen a month earlier, and a huge step forward from the 85,000 observed in the same month a year earlier.
Who is doing the hiring?
Last month, hiring efforts were somewhat split between the smallest companies – those with between one and 19 employees – and slightly larger ones with 20 to 49 workers, the report said. The former brought aboard some 57,000 new employees, while the latter hired 51,000. Those numbers marked a bit of a change on both a monthly and annual basis, though. Smaller firms took a huge step forward from the 44,000 seen in February and the 36,000 observed in March 2014. Meanwhile, the slightly larger ones actually fared a little less well, falling back from 59,000 from a month earlier, but still growing from 48,000 the previous year.
When broken down by sector, the service-providing industries significantly outpaced those that produce goods, with 98,000 new hires to just 10,000, the report said. But here too, there was little differentiation between the number hired by very small or middlingly small businesses. These numbers were a bit of a mixed bag on both monthly and yearly bases; service-producing companies improved across the board, from 86,000 in February and 72,000 last March, while goods-producing numbers were down in both cases, from 17,000 and 12,000, respectively.
Owners who want to continue expanding their companies’ hiring reach in the coming months may want to start looking at ways they can cut costs to potentially free up thousands of dollars each year. One way in which they might be able to do this is by finding more affordable small business insurance policies, including those for general liability insurance, to ensure that their bottom lines are as trim and flexible as possible. That, in turn, could help them make many more improvements to their firms.
