The true definition of a Small Business is a business that is independently owned and operated, is not dominant in its field of operation, and meets certain standards of size in terms of employees or annual receipts. The purpose of this post is to give people a few statistics on small businesses, as well as hopefully impact your impression and interest in small businesses.

The effects of small businesses on the economy

There are over 20 million full and part-time home-based businesses in the United States.
Nearly 750,000 tax-paying, employee-hiring businesses are started every year.
Small Businesses create 75 percent of the new jobs in the United States.
Of all non-produce businesses in the United States, almost 97 percent are considered small by the SBA standards.
Small businesses account for more than 50 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP).
About 80 percent of all Americans get their first job at a small business.

Although there are so many small businesses that open every year, many studies say that a third of them fail in the first four years. Another study says roughly 60 percent of them fail within the first six years! So I am going to continue with some reasons why a lot of them fail so you can think through these things.
Why small businesses fail

Testing the Waters: Plunging in without testing on a small scale.
Pricing: Underpricing or overpricing goods or services.
Marketing: Understanding how much time it will take to build a market.
Money Starting with too much capital and being careless or too little and going under.
Experience: Going into business with little or no experience in the industry or market.
Management: A lot of small businesses go out of business because of poor management.

As a small web development company, we had to run through this list to make sure we were starting our business on the path of success. This is how we met each of these requirements to ensure our success, maybe these models will help you in your venture as well.

We started with (and you should as well) experience. All of the employees in Chosen come from a design, marketing, or development related background and know their talents well. This is crucial as more web related businesses begin to spring up, many do not have the background, experience or skills needed to develop high quality applications, and portfolios can be very misleading. To ensure that our employees are competent, we have them get certified for specific technologies via Brainbench, as well as blog and host seminars to share their skills with others (studies say the best way to learn is to teach). Once we had done this with our core team, we knew we had the experience and knowledge base to move to the next step.