Micro is the New Small

If you were doing a presentation for one hundred Canadian business presidents, and you said, “Stand up if you have less than 100 employees,” everyone would stand up except for 2 people.  Curiously, everybody standing would be the president of a “small” business, according to Statistics Canada.  Some non-government organizations consider 1 to 500 as small, well others consider 1 to 50 as small.  Talk about identity crisis in market segmentation.

Now, if you asked the presidents to sit down if they had over 10 employees, 23 more people would sit down.  A full 75 percent of Canadian businesses have 10 or fewer employees.  10 is way different than 100, or even 50.  1 to 100 is hardly a category.  Its like the Marketing department in Ottawa got lazy.

The department that didn’t get lazy was the Department of Revenue.  You can only claim the small business tax deduction if your net profit is less than $500,000.  Depending on how your small business does its taxes and how much the average team member makes, that puts your maximum gross revenue somewhere between 2.5 and 5 million, or 15 to 40 people.  That feels a little closer to small, but still a ways off from the truly small.

I wonder if we need to either rethink what “small” is or think of a better category. I think that category is micro business, or teams of 10 or less.

Micro is the new small! Micro business is the new category.

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