It is always good for the small business owner’s morale knowing hiring is up and the economy is recovering. According to recent numbers, hiring in June has been the strongest since two years ago, and that can only be good for the US economy and the small firms across the United States. For more info about this and other stories follow the links below.
Small business hiring surges to fastest pace since early 2012
Now that’s more like it.
Small businesses nationally added 117,000 jobs in June, a 60 percent increase over their average for the first five months of the year and the fastest pace of hiring since early 2012, according to the latest numbers published Thursday by payroll processing firm ADP.
More than the companies in any other size category, those small firms pushed the overall job numbers last month to 281,000, the highest mark since fall 2012. Construction, transportation and professional services sectors posted the steepest gains.
“The job market is steadily improving,” Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moody’s Analytics, said in the report, noting that the gains were “broad based across all industries and company sizes.”
Still, it’s a particularly important rebound for the county’s smallest employers, who are often lauded as the most steady job creators but hadn’t cracked six-digits in monthly job gains since November. In addition, June was the second straight month that small companies have contributed more than 40 percent of all jobs created — a mark they fell shy of during the first four months of the year.
The Not-So-Small Business Administration
Last month the Small Business Administration updated the criteria it uses to determine what qualifies as a “small business” for the first time since 2008. The formula varies by industry, sometimes calculated by number of employees, other times by annual revenues or total assets. Thanks to the change, approximately 8,500 more companies (some with more than 1,000 employees) will now be eligible for the designation—and the federal assistance that goes with it.
MOUNT KISCO, N.Y. — Operators at KES Dispatch keep track of the company’s taxis on a yellow legal pad. They communicate with cars using a two-way radio. Drivers navigate their journeys largely by memory.
In the age of Uber and Lyft, the company is desperate to modernize.
“I gotta change something,” said Miguel Duarte, who has run his Mount Kisco, N.Y., company for 13 years. “I gotta stay ahead of the competition.”
Help is on the way. Dashride, a new start-up, wants to give KES Dispatch a fighting chance. It is helping Mr. Duarte modernize his company’s clunky dispatch system, starting with a mobile app that will soon let customers book, track, pay for and rate rides.
Dashride is just one of several web-based start-ups with a mission of empowering small, local businesses — often in struggling, traditional industries — by equipping them with tools and strategies that could help them keep up with changing times.
For example, Cups, a coffee subscription app that came to New York in April, helps independent coffee shops compete with giant chains like Starbucks and Dunkin’ Donuts. It is working with 50 small shops in Manhattan and Brooklyn. ShopKeep, a New York company, helps small businesses ring up sales, accept credit cards, email receipts or print remotely with an iPad-based checkout system.
