Small firm owners make many consequential decisions every day. Some are clearly strategic, such as when to hire workers, whether to expand their operations, or how to finance that growth. Others are more routine, but no less important, for example which accounting software to use, how frequently to run payroll, or which technologies to adopt. Although making the wrong choice can have lasting impact, these decisions are often made while owners are juggling the day-to-day press

Here on the blog, we often talk about the plethora of data available on small firms and why some are useful, and others are not. But the common thread of all of our posts is that small firm data is omnipresent.

We're pleased to announce six upcoming early findings events, where we'll share an inside look into initial findings from the Small Firm Diaries USA study, and invite discussion about implications for policy, practice, and efforts to better support small firms and workers in the United States.

In our last blog post, we explored how employment numbers are recorded among U.S. firms at a single point each year—March 12—and how this approach fails to capture the volatility of employment among small firms with 1–20 workers. In today’s post, we use new data from the SFD USA sample to further illustrate this point.