The BIC opinion poll

Research conducted by the North East BIC highlights that one of the main ambitions of small business owners is to ‘grow business and become a larger employer’, yet year on year national and regional statistics indicate that over 95% of businesses have less than 10 staff. We conducted a poll via bdaily to attempt to outline a single factor which may prevent businesses from growing beyond this threshold.

The results were varied:
Poor sales: 31.3%
Red tape: 28.1%
Failure to re-invest in the business: 25%
Risk aversion: 15.6%

What we have here is yet more evidence that the recession is continuing to stunt the growth of businesses as belts tighten across all sectors. It’s likely that poor sales will continue to burden SMEs for some time yet.

Some positivity may be drawn from the fact that ‘red-tape’ comes a close second in the poll. As the public sector become a less reliable source of contracting, and the power-balance shifts toward the arguably more dynamic private sector, business owners may find that there are less hoops to jump through and ‘red tape’ issues are taken care of more quickly.

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