MEDC Small Business Survey Findings

MEDC partnered with Economic Impact Catalyst (EIC), a third-party technology platform and data analytics firm, to conduct a small business survey across the State of Michigan. Survey responses were collected between October 2021 – January 2022. The survey was designed to help the MEDC and the State of Michigan better connect financial resources and support services to the needs of micro, place-based and underrepresented small businesses across the State.

Key Findings

Top 3 challenges for small businesses were:

  1. Hiring and retaining talent
  2. Creating demand and generating revenue
  3. Addressing the impact to their businesses from supply chain disruptions

Biggest Challenges For Small vs Micro Businesses:

The main challenges they face are with hiring and retaining talent, access to capital, sales and marketing to generate demand, make up their lost revenue from the past two years, and address supply chain issues from global impact of the pandemic. Needs vary by size of business, capital is #1 for the smallest and hiring is #1 for the biggest small businesses.

The major assets available to small businesses to support their businesses across the state were:

  • Accounting & Finance Management - 61
  • Communications, Marketing & Public Relations - 73
  • Technology & Software Services - 94
  • Sales & Customer Acquisition - 33
  • Team, Talent & Human Resources - 68
  • Legal Services - 30
  • Management & Operations – 105

Top needs for small businesses were:

  1. Marketing (Demand generation)
  2. Sales (Demand generation)
  3. Technology (Demand generation/ Supply Chain issues)
  4. Human Resources (Hiring)

Business sentiment:

  • Very Confident 35%
  • Somewhat Confident 32%
  • Unsure 23%
  • Somewhat Unconfident 6%
  • Very Unconfident 5%

Presentations

For your convenience, MEDC has included the full compilation of the survey findings below.