table of “small business standards”<\/a>, you will see that the threshold is different for each industry! In 41 pages! So for example, a chicken egg business qualifies as “small” if it has less than $19M in annual receipts, while a sugar beet farm making that much would not be small (it must make less than $2.5M). In contrast, a nuclear power plant with fewer than 1150 employees is “small”, but a geothermal power plant must have fewer than 250 employees.<\/p>\nThere’s no rationale given for how these thresholds were chosen, so I don’t know how much work is involved, but tailoring thresholds for every one of these business areas seems like it must be quite tedious. They are updated once or twice a year. I’m thinking it’s more than a simple formula, since otherwise they could replace the entire table with the formula. Is it the result of negotiation between the SBA and business owners? Is it a capacity constraint, and they pick a threshold so only a fixed number of businesses that year qualify? Do economists weigh in? Mysterious!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’ve heard of small businesses, but the other day it occurred to me that I wasn’t sure how we actually determine whether a business is “small.” I figured the Small Business Administration must have a definition, to determine who falls into their jurisdiction. And sure enough, here’s where the SBA defines small businesses. This matters […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[69],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5591"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5591"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5591\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5602,"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5591\/revisions\/5602"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5591"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5591"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5591"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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I figured the Small Business Administration<\/a> must have a definition, to determine who falls into their jurisdiction. And sure enough, here’s where the SBA defines small businesses<\/a>. This matters because if your business is “small”, it can qualify for certain loans and other opportunities that only small businesses can access. <\/p>\n