Today is National Mom and Pop Business Owners Day. Rick Segal of Poinciana, Florida, is credited with the creation of the holiday that is set to celebrate small business owners. Segal originally created the holiday to honor the small business that his parents started in Everett, MA on March 29, 1939. Originally a hat shop call “Ruth’s”, it later grew into a woman’s specialty clothing store in Medford, MA that had over $2 million in revenue when it closed in 1997.

Small business owners are the backbone of America. According to the US Small Business Administration, small businesses represent 99.7% of all employer firms and employ over half of all private sector employees. Small businesses have generated 64% of net new jobs over the past 15 years. In addition, small businesses produce 13 times more patents per employee than large firms, and their patents are twice as likely to be among the one percent most cited patents.

The enormous risk that small business owners take and the countless hours that small business owners pour into their business often result in little to no reward, yet they push on any way.

One way to celebrate the Mom & Pop Business Owner is to commit yourself to shop in their stores and eat in their restaurants on this special day.

How else do you plan to celebrate Mom & Pop Business Owner day? Let us know!

In this guest post, Steve Hartkopf, shares some insights on Job Creation and Growth Companies.

The respected MIT professor and lead researcher at Cognetics David Birch is a true pioneer when it comes to statistical analysis of growth firms. Birch defines growth firms as companies with $100,000 in sales that grow an average of 20 percent or more over for a four-year period, which means they basically double in size over the four years. Does that sound like a major accomplishment to you?

The facts indicate it is tremendous accomplishment. By Birch’s count, only about 352,000 companies qualify, fewer than 2 percent, of America’s roughly 20,000,000 firms make the grade. Most of these companies are small to midsized and only 5 percent of them employ more than 100 people even after their four-year growth surge.

So one could ask, if true growth firms represent such a small portion of our nation’s total population of companies, why should we care? The answer may surprise you and it holds the key to evaluating the success or failure of our current economic policies and job-growth initiatives. It is this small band of exceptional companies that lead the entire U.S economy in employment and innovation.

Large companies and mom-and-pop outfits don’t create jobs. Between 1989 and 1993, a time of relative little to no economic expansion, growth firms added 4.4 million jobs. Similarly, between 1994 and 1998 growth firms accounted for about 95 percent of the total job growth, adding 10.7 million of the 11.1 million new jobs.

To paraphrase Birch, “Small companies can change direction and react to market forces and large companies can’t.” Adaptability and flexibility are key attributes for success and growth. Success and growth require more people to do the work.

If we want to know whether our government’s economic policies and “Job Initiatives” are working all you have to do is watch the growth firms. I have a better idea, maybe we should listen to them too.

Steve’s firm, Aligned Marketing,  is a marketing consulting firm with core competencies in strategy development, communication planning and technology solutions.  You can reach Steve via his website at www.aligned-marketing.com or via email at shartkopf@aligned-marketing.com.

If you think that Social Media websites such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube are a waste of time and can not be used in your business, you better watch this.  After you watch it, you will want to find a way to incorporate it into your marketing strategy. (Hat tip to Rick Telberg from CPA Trendlines for this one.)