Despite the fact that the global economy is slowly starting to recover, owners of small businesses are still under a lot of pressure and stress. This discovery was made by Brother International Corporation’s annual small business survey.
In the research participated about 500 small business owners which had companies that employed less than 100 people. It was conducted over a one-month period through the web.
The Stress Factor
What the study found was the owners of small companies were extremely stressed. Nearly 60% of them said that their levers of stress were very high. In comparison, last year their number was equal to 55%. Moreover, over 40% of the small business owners who took part in the survey reported that last year was worse for their firm than they have expected it to be.
Also, a smaller part of the people who participated in the research claimed that they are feeling more stressed than ever before. Their number was about 13% of all 500 small business owners that were interviewed. That is considerably less compared to 2012 when the highly stressed owners of small firms were reported to be nearly 25%.
In addition, the majority of owners of small companies have started to save up a big part of their profits. Nearly 50% of the all small business owners are saving for rainy days. According to Brother International Corporation, that was due to the owners’ worries over a possible economic downtrend. The other half of the participants in the study, however, has stated that they prefer to avoid an eventual economic collapse by investing more in their businesses.
Love for Technology
Another interesting finding of Brother International Corporation’s annual small business survey was that small businesses have become more dependent on technology. As a matter of fact, 75% of small business owners are more worried when the computers in their company break than if they have fewer employees at work.
How can this discovery be explained? According to the research, this trend is caused by small business’ dependency on technology. Technology crashes result in less productivity for nearly half of the surveyed small business owners. In addition, often these malfunctions lead to lost opportunities and missed deadlines.
But the strong relationship between small businesses and technology does not end here. Brother International Corporation has found that most small company owners are ready to go to extremes to prevent technology malfunctions and crashes. Over 15% of them would readily give up one week of profits if that could reduce the tech issues in their company. Also, more than 30% of them would give up one week of vacation for the same reason.
Finally, nearly 45% of the small business owners that participated in the research stated that they want to improve the technological effectiveness of their firm. In fact, the study shows that this was their main priority.
