Over the last few years, the number of jobs created by small business owners have been sizable, but it’s important for owners to keep in mind that they may still face some serious difficulties in hiring as they move forward, even with the economy being more robust than it has in some time.
A number of recent studies have shown that small business hiring has sputtered in recent months, and may be a sign that the recovery for many of these companies hasn’t been as strong as it perhaps should be, according to a report from the Washington Post. Some have noted that much of this more recent difficulty could be the result of owners in many parts of the country simply not being able to hire because of the harsh winter weather seen over the last several months, but other experts say that the problem is deeper than that, and tied to something over which small businesses have no control: The broader housing market.
“The key to small business job growth is the housing recovery,” Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Analytics, recently said on a conference call, according to the newspaper. “The big guys are not as tied to housing, at least not to the same degree. A lot of the growth among small businesses usually comes from fast-growing start-ups, and that’s just not happening right now. Unless that changes, I think that’s going to be a problem moving into the second half of the decade.”
Why is that an issue?
When the housing market suffers overall, banks are often less likely to be as free with their credit issuing efforts, the report said. As such, many small businesses simply do not have access to the kind of financing upon which they used to be able to rely when they wanted to expand, and thus hiring can be a bit difficult. As a result, any future difficulties in that sector could end up impacting small businesses significantly going forward.
Owners who want to expand in the near future might want to think about what they can do for themselves to get the process going, such as reducing expenses for the company overall. That may include finding more affordable small business insurance policies, such as consultant insurance, which could end up saving enterprises thousands of dollars per year that can then be devoted to hiring more workers.
