Letter from the Editor
Numbers make case for entrepreneurs
Birmingham Business Journal - by Barr Nobles Editor
As we publish our annual Outstanding Entrepreneurs in a salute to the entrepreneurial spirit (see related profiles, Pages 16-17), let's turn to a noted aphorist and to a noted realist for their thoughts on the subject.
Mason Cooley, the aphorist, probably had a cheekful of tongue when he described entrepreneurship as "the last refuge of the trouble-making individual."
While Cooley's line is worth a chuckle, we turn to Michael Ricks, Alabama district director of the Small Business Administration, for a tally of the good entrepreneurs do:
Small businesses make up 97.3 percent of all Alabama employers and create more than 50 percent of the U.S. non-farm private gross domestic product (GDP). Small patenting firms produce about 14 times more patents per employee than large patenting firms.
The 323,891 small businesses in Alabama are located in every community and neighborhood. They employ 49.7 percent of Alabama's non-farm private-sector workers.
Home-based businesses account for 53 percent of all small businesses. Small businesses are 97 percent of America's exporters and produce 26 percent of all export value.
Alabama saw an estimated 9,413 new small firms with employees start up in the last year measured.
There are about 38,500 minority-owned businesses and 81,951 women-owned businesses in Alabama, and almost all of them are small businesses.
Small business creates 65 percent or more of America's net new jobs.
Not bad results for a bunch of trouble-makers.
The judges
We would like to thank this year's judges, Susan Matlock, president of the Entrepreneurial Center, and Ed Fields, vice president of business services at the Birmingham Regional Chamber of Commerce.
More than 50 Entrepreneur profiles gathered from 2005 were pored over, and the judges picked 10 of the best and then selected the most outstanding business. Not an easy task. Criteria for the 10 Outstanding Entrepreneurs included traits such as resiliency, creativity, economic impact on the community and overall growth of the company.
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