Starting a Small Business
Coordinator: Thank you all for standing by. At this time I would like to inform all participants that your lines are on a listen only mode during the conference. This call is being recorded. If you have any objections you may disconnect at this time. I will now turn the call over to Ms. Lynda Lee. Ma'am, you may begin. Lynda Lee: Good afternoon everyone. My name is Lynda Lee and I'd like to welcome everyone to the Exploring Census Data webinar series. This is our fourth installment of the series where
we bring you monthly webinars based on popular topics. Our webinars are presented in a format where we include real life use cases and the opportunity for Q&A at the end of each session. And if you would like to view it again we offer the recordings and transcript on our site typically between five to ten business days after the live session. The link on this slide takes you to a page where you can learn more about our recordings. Today's webinar on starting a small business using Census data, is the first in our series for this year and today you are in for a treat. We have two seasoned presenters ready to dive into the data to show you how Census data can be valuable in your process of starting a small business.
Up first is Mr. Andrew Hait. Mr. Hait is an economist with over 30 plus years of experience with business data. His current capacity includes being a project manager for one of our data tools, called the Census Business Builder. Our next speaker is Mr. Caleb Hopler. Mr. Hopler is a statistician with our demographic program called American Community Survey. Before I hand over the presentation to our first speaker, let's take a look at what we will be covering today. I will start off by doing an overview about the Census Bureau.
And to build in more time for today's topic the next few slides will be high level and very brief. If you're interested in learning more, please visit our site, Census.gov and explore our Census Academy section where we have many recordings on the general overview. Then I will hand the presentation over to my colleague, Mr. Andrew Hait, where he will take you through the types of small businesses and how Census data can be useful when you're looking to start one. Mr. Hopler will then be relating the demographic aspect from
the American Community Survey that are important to know and demonstrating how we access this data. We'll then volley the ball back to Mr. Hait where you'll learn about the business data from the county business patterns, non-employer statistics, the Annual Business Survey and our newer program called the non-employer statistics by demographics. You'll also learn how to access these type of data and at the end of each session we will open the lines up for a Q&A section of the webinar.
The Census Bureau is the federal government's largest statistical agency where we conduct over 130 plus surveys each year. Listed on this slide are some of our well known surveys that you may be familiar with. The decennial census takes place every ten years and is the population and housing count of the United States.
Next, the American Community Survey is an annual survey of the nation's population. And in a little while Mr. Hopler will dive more into this program. The economic census is our most comprehensive program for business data, taking place every five years, in the years ending in 2 and 7. The Census of Government is the public sector's counterpart of the Economic Census. So these are only a handful of our surveys. When you have a moment I highly encourage you to check out Census.gov to learn about our other surveys that
we conduct and the types of data that may interest you. This slide shows the relationship between the frequency of data release and the level of detail. In general, the more timely the data the less detail. With the Economic Census at the bottom of the pyramid because it takes place every five years and is the most comprehensive data source when it comes to business data.
But as you move up the pyramid the data released more frequently with less details. This slide shows some key terms that may be helpful for you to know when you're using Census Bureau data. NAICS is the North American Industry Classification System that is used to classify each business. A business is classified on the majority of the business activity. So for instance, if a business location manufactures a product in the back and has a retail store up front, it can be classified as a manufacturing establishment if over 50% of the activity occurring at that location is manufacturing.
Next is a term establishment as opposed to companies and firms. An establishment is a single location. Firms can have multiple establishments under them. So an oversimplified example would be a parent/child relationship where a parent can have multiple children.
And finally Titles 13 and 26 are the codes that allow us to conduct surveys and ensure privacy and confidentiality to all of our respondents. Now I know I went over everything on a high level and very fast. If you're interested in learning more about any of the content in the overview, please visit Census.gov. We have many helpful webinars archived on our site found under Census Academy. And now I would like to turn over the presentation to my colleague, Mr. Andrew Hait. Andrew Hait: Thank you so much, Lynda. Let me go ahead and share my screen. So again, my name is Andy Hait. I'm an economist at the US Census Bureau.
And today I'm going to be walking through some of the steps that businesses can take and the data that we have at the Census Bureau that can help them. When we think about the way the Census Bureau could help entrepreneurs with opening and starting a new business, this slide provides a very simplified look at the four basic steps that entrepreneurs go through when they are starting a business. To start off they come up with the idea. I've decided I’m going to retire from the Census Bureau and I want to open a Greek restaurant in Anne Arundel County, Maryland. That is my original idea. Step 2 is I then conduct market research to determine is opening a Greek restaurant in Anne Arundel County, Maryland a good idea, or is maybe a neighboring town even better? Within the county are there specific cities or towns that I might want to look at? What type of employment data or payroll data for the existing restaurants do we have, and what on average, do restaurants in this county, pay their employees? These types of statistics could be very, very useful to businesses when they are deciding whether or not their idea makes sense.
Now periodically in conducting that market research they have to loop back to the original idea. Maybe opening that Greek restaurant in Anne Arundel County is not a great idea. Maybe opening it in one of the neighboring counties is a better idea. Or maybe not even opening a restaurant at all. Maybe I want to open a catering business. So that constant looping back and forth between step one and step two, are typical of how small businesses get started. Once they finish completing that market research, businesses and entrepreneurs go ahead into step three where they're looking at securing the funding that they need to open their business; determining an actual location and signing a lease for that particular physical location; and all of the other steps that are involved in sort of getting the business off the ground.
And finally, in step four, the business opens. Even once the business is opened they periodically can loop back to step one. I've been running my business for a year. It seems to be doing okay. But could I be doing even better? Should I maybe consider adding some other product lines to my restaurant? Maybe do I want to offer services that I'm not currently providing, like a catering operation? Of these four steps the Census Bureau can help with step two. And when we help with step two it's important to think about the different types of businesses and how the Census Bureau data fit. So when we think about the two basic types of businesses they are B to B or what we call businesses that cater to other businesses and B to C businesses. Businesses that cater to the general public.
Understanding what type of business you're interested in opening, helps users understand which specific programs in the Census Bureau best meet their needs. So for example, if I was opening a business that caters to other businesses, the customers of my business would be other businesses, so that would be economic data. The competitors of my business would also be other businesses so that would be our business data again. And finally, the suppliers, complementary businesses, and other sort of related businesses
again, would be business data. So those demographic statistics might not be as important for a B to B business because my customers of my B to B would be other businesses. However, if I was interested in opening a business that caters to the general public, what we typically call a B to C business, we'd have the same questions as above, but those particular data variables would then be different because the customers would be demographic data. So in today's session we're going to be walking through an example of a person who wants to open an automobile parts and accessories store, which is classified using the North American Industry Classification System, or NAICS code 441310. This is not a B to B business, it's a retail store. So it's a B to C. So the customers of my business are going to primarily be people who own cars - shade tree mechanics who live within a certain distance of the business.
The competitors for my automobile parts and accessory store would be other auto parts stores in the area. So knowing something about how many of them are, would be great. And then finally, my suppliers are the auto parts wholesalers that I'm going to be buying those parts from to sell in my retail store. A second example that sort of builds on the same auto parts theme, is an auto parts wholesale business. This is not a B to C business. The customers of an auto
parts wholesaler are primarily other businesses. In this case the customers would primarily be auto repair facilities, used car dealers, and retail parts stores that are in that particular area. However, knowing something about the customer of my customers, the customers of those retail parts stores or the customers of those auto repair facilities could be really useful because it would help me understand what types of products do I want to sell in my wholesale business to those auto repair facilities or those retail parts stores.
If I had a customer that had customers that were in a fairly higher income area then perhaps providing more brand new parts would be really important. Whereas, if a customer of my auto parts wholesale business was a retail store that was located maybe in a slightly lower income community, maybe some of those recycled or those repaired, or those refurbished are going to be half the cost of a brand new part might be really good. So these data are all really important. And the Census Bureau programs provide information that
can help guide these decisions. So the first program we're going to talk about today and then I'm going to turn it over to my colleague, Caleb Hopler, is the American Community Survey. This is a fantastic program that could help those B to C businesses, understand the demographic, socioeconomic, and housing characteristics of the areas that they serve. So with that, I'm going to turn it back over to Caleb. Go ahead, Caleb. Caleb Hopler: Thank you very much, Andy. I'm going to go ahead and share my screen here.
As mentioned, my name is Caleb Hopler. I'm a survey statistician for the American Community Survey Office here at the US Census Bureau. I'd like to talk about the American Community Survey or for short, the ACS, and how this data can provide you with key statistics to build your workforce and define your target market.
So a little bit of a background on the ACS. It is the nation's most current, reliable, and accessible data source for social, economic, housing and demographic data at many geographic levels. And we have topics such as age, commuting, income, employment, and I'll actually show you a lot more on the next slide, but first I want to share about our three key annual data releases that you can see on the right. So our one year estimates are for large populations. In other words, it's for data, for areas with populations of 65,000 or more, and then we also have the one year supplemental estimates for small populations of 20,000 or more. And lastly,
we have our five year estimates. This is data for all areas. So it would be great to get very small populations. And I'll get into the geographies and the availability in just a few slides here. So the ACS provides detailed information about the population and workforce in local communities that can for example, help businesses choose appropriate locations perhaps for a new store, their office or their warehouse forward to expand as well.
And then such variables that we have that could be useful for businesses, are labor force status like employment, unemployment, full time, part time status, the means of transportation to work, and then also the travel time to work, income and occupation. We have household income, earnings, occupation, industry, even education like the highest level of education that's been attained, or the field of Bachelor's Degree. So these variables and more help to define your target market and give an insight into your workforce as well. The ACS provides data for more geographies on an annual basis than any other household survey. In total we provide data for over 805,000 geographic areas which relates to over 35,000 communities within the United States. So the image on this slide shows some of the
geographies for which ACS data re produced, and then also the relationship between them. So the lower geographic areas fit neatly within the larger areas directly connected by the lines you see on the screen. So example, the school, the congressional and state legislative districts, they fit neatly within states and they don't cross the state boundaries. However, they may cross the boundaries of counties or surrounding metropolitan areas for example.
You can see here at the very bottom of the vertical line is the block group. That's the smallest geographic building block that the ACS provides data. The ACS's is unique ability to report on a wide range of geographies is what gives it such a broad appeal. So let's go into a little bit of an example of how these geographies relate to each other and why it's actually important to you. If you're starting a business and let's just say you have an idea you would like to start in the county of El Paso. You want to know is El Paso even the right place; is Texas going to be still the ideal for your business; where in El Paso are you going to place your business? So you can look first at general statewide statistics - economic, social, housing, demographic type data with ACS for the state of Texas and then look at the county of El Paso and compare if you'd like, to other counties, whether it's the surrounding counties or an area of a region or the entire state. You can compare those statistics and if you still
realize okay, yes, county of El Paso is where I want to be, let's divide that into Census Track. Census Track here you can start to get a little bit of an idea of a "neighborhood level" because it divides very fine where you can compare between the Census Tracks to find the right area. Divide that even further and now you realize okay, I can look at my block group and get the very finite specific area that would be best for my business or best to send out marketing for my products or services. And even I'm getting a great understanding into my workforce, such as their commuting characteristics to or from, or what have you. So now that I've gone over the basics of the ACS, its variables and some of the geographies, I would like to highlight some differences between the ACS and in the Census economic programs that my colleague Andy will be talking about. So first, ACS is at the household level. It's not at the establishment level.
And then also when we're talking about industry, ACS is categorized with its industry by Census industry codes. So whereas economic programs utilizes NAICS the ACS can't use NAICS because since we are a household survey it just doesn't fit to where an establishment survey - so like NAICS is based off of establishment surveys. Since we're not based off of where people work but based where people live, we had to create our own code, so that's the Census industry codes. And then lastly, we do have differences in our geographies. Econ goes by zip codes but we have something similar. We have statistical boundaries that are called zip TAs. And that's simply zip code tabulation area. If you're looking for tribal business, when you're looking at economic programs tribal businesses are denoting the establishment itself that has identified as tribal.
With the ACS you are going to be looking at tribal areas, so boundaries around a geographic area, such as a Hawaiian homeland or getting down into Census tribal track or tribal block group. And then also there are public establishments. So if someone is looking at creating a business to help support services for our local government, economic programs is going to be showing data based off of that establishment itself, the local or state government. When you're looking at ACS data again, you're looking at a geographic area, not a place. So we would have our legal areas, legal boundaries. And so you could think of a
congressional district, school district, state legislative district, etc. The ACS is the primary data source to understand local conditions and trends throughout the United States. So it's a rich source of information for businesses. The ACS provides critical information that businesses need to make investments and operational decisions to help generate economic activity, boost employment, and improve the standard of living in communities across the country.
So some examples of how ACS data are used, you can use it to determine when and where to open new facilities, or expand existing ones based on population and demographic trends. Likewise, you can create effective marketing or merchandising strategies to better serve customers and investors. Use ACS data to inform hiring decisions and workforce evaluation or forecast growth in sales to make better strategic decisions. And stock shelves with the goods suited to local household incomes or demographics. You can invest in infrastructure improvements and also perform risk analysis. We do feature several videos in the library section of the ACS Web site that showcases how ACS data are being used by the business community. So one example is how Target uses ACS data to better
serve their guests. And we also have another video of how the Greater Houston Partnership uses ACS data to help them understand how their population is changing and encourage economic development in Houston. So participating in the ACS gives communities the information they need to attract businesses. An example here of in real life how ACS data is used, if the Maricopa Association of Governments - they use ACS data to create commute shared reports. So these reports show the
area from which a worker can commute in 30 minutes or less to a given location, and provide a useful picture of the residents, workers, and employers near that given location. The reports present ACS data on educational attainment, median household income, median age, occupation and - as well as from other data sources for the commute shed. The reports were meant to be used for economic development opportunities with potential businesses locating throughout their region. Also another cool use case of ACS data but also of economic data as well, through the Census Bureau, a successful high end component manufacturer for a mountain bike considered opening his own bike shop to sell his manufactured components along with mountain bikes and other components. So he used
ACS data to identify the potential customers and he was looking for young professionals with moderate to high median household income that he could then market his new business. He also used Census business data to identify locations where sporting goods stores which is NAICS 451110, that includes bike shops, where they are located. These data not only identified possible competitors to his business, but also potential businesses to collaborate with by opening a lease department within a larger store.
There are a lot of different ways to access ACS data. I'd like to share just a couple of selective ways to access ACS data of our various data tools. So first of all we have Quick Facts, and as the name implies, it's a very quick way to grab facts fast. It shows key statistics at various geographic levels that you could see either as a good print out of a data table, or you can even make a dashboard and map it out and compare the statistics to the surrounding geographies.
The My Congressional District and My Tribal Area, those are tools that pull key statistics for a particular congressional district or a tribal area. On the map for emergency management helps emergency professionals and planning personnel to be able to utilize ACS data, take a look at a current emergency or pandemic, or even historic issues within the United States, and figure out and for planning purposes, where to send resources and who to help what is the current picture. And also we have Census Business Builder which is a sweet tool that marries economic data and ACS data together, to provide a great overview picture of a particular area and will give you all of the business type data that you need. Tiger line shape files are files that you can map out data and create your own maps. And what's nice is we also have these shape files with selected demographic data, ACS data so that you can create very quickly, a map according to your needs. A couple of other things - we have the API, the Application
Program Interface is a quick way to access ACS data for your different apps or programs. A new program is the COVID-19 data hub. And so this program here provides economic and demographic resources concerning the current pandemic of COVID-19. And lastly we have the Data.Census.gov which is the Census Bureau's main data dissemination platform. And I would actually like to show a quick demo of this platform. So if I were to want to open up a particular store I could go into Data.Census.gov to understand
the geographic area that I want to place that store in and then what kind of statistics that will allow me to pull in the best products for my store, etc. So if I want to look at maybe I'm interested in looking at “neighborhoods” to start a business within a county in Florida, and I want to get as much data as I can to get a general overview and idea, I'm going to go to Advanced Search and I will start off with keying into my geographies and then I will go down to a great way to go to a Census Track to get "neighborhoods." Go into Florida and then I would just type in - or I could scroll down to Orange County, Florida and I'm going to choose either all of the Census Tracks within that county or I can click random ones that fit my general area and then I can go ahead and click Search. This is going to bring up all of the tables that if I click Tables here, I can see all of the tables that apply to those geographies.
And if I want to narrow it down one way that I could do that is actually if I search up here starting up here, and I type in DP0*. So DP0* - the DP is data profile and then if I put - place hat star that means it'll pull up all tables that start with DP0. I'm going to click Search here. And as you can see, it has now pulled out all of the different tables for those Census Tracks that I had originally placed and I can great selected characteristics of economics, housing characteristics, social characteristics such as employment status.
I can find disability status or the number of vehicles that are in a home, household type, the relationship and much, much more. So to continue the conversation as I wrap up, you can follow ACS information and updates by signing up for the gov delivery at the top left there. You can also follow us on social media at #ACSData. Of course to learn more, the best place to go is our Web site at www.Census.gov/ACS.
But if you'd like to call or write us our email here, ACS.User.Support. And then the number you see on the screen would be great ways to get hold of us so that we can answer your questions. So one last thing before I turn it over to Andy.
If you have used ACS data to make an important decision or help your community or to expand your business, please visit the link at the bottom of the slide. We would love to hear your data story and we'd love to be able to put it on our Web site as well. So by hearing and seeing your data story it helps provide further support for the importance of the data we collect here at the Census Bureau, and it's a great way to further promote our data. So I'll now turn the presentation over to my colleague, Andrew Hait who will walk us through the economic programs. Andrew Hait: Great. Thank you so much again, Caleb. So as you can see, the American Community Survey is an amazing resource that entrepreneurs can use to help them understand the demographic, socioeconomic and housing characteristics of their customers.
When most business owners think about their business they could probably if you ask them, to describe an ideal customer. So identifying those communities that provide that data, that have a large number of those particular customers, can be incredibly valuable. It's especially important, the American Community Survey is especially valuable because of that fine level of geographic data that you can get down to.
Caleb pointed out that the American Community Survey is available down to the Census Track levels or what we closely call or sort of call a neighborhood. It's not exactly a neighborhood but it's as close as we get to a neighborhood. And those could be really valuable to entrepreneurs. But as valuable as the demographic data are, they are only part of the data that an entrepreneur, a business owner needs. They also need business data about other businesses in their industry. So that they can compare themselves to other businesses like them. And the first two programs I want to talk about
are programs called County Business Patterns, or CBP and non-employer statistics or NES. County Business Patterns is an annual program that we publish every year, that publishes information on employer businesses. These are businesses with one or more paid employee who filed a payroll tax form with the IRS. These are the businesses that we typically think of in our communities. And if I was opening that auto parts retail business in Orange County, Florida, I'd want to know something about the other auto parts businesses that are already there, to determine is this market already well being served by the businesses there or maybe is there room for my business? The data that are published include statistics from a number of businesses or what we call an establishment, employment and payroll. You will notice that we do not have data in County Business Patterns on sales, shipments, receipts, revenue or other measures of output. For that we'd have to turn to other programs.
But County Business Patterns is still an amazingly valuable program because it is very detailed by industry. It has these three basic statistics. And it is also one of our most detailed programs in terms of the geography. Data are published in County Business Patterns at the national, state, metropolitan area, county, congressional district, and even zip code, good old fashioned US Postal Service zip code levels. The data are also broken up by other dimensions including the employment size of the establishment. So if we wanted to understand how important small businesses are in this particular industry, this program would provide that. And even
information or legal form of organizations. So how is that business legal organized? These data can be used by entrepreneurs and business owners, to help them understand their customers for B to B type businesses, as well as their competitors and suppliers for all businesses. The employment size data can be really useful to help them understand what is sort of the perfect or optimal size of my business? As my business grows, is there a size that I ought to strive to grow to? And that beyond that size maybe some of the operations of the business start should be able to taper off. It's not as efficient to operate. The legal form organization data can be really useful to help entrepreneurs understand and plan for which legal form they should file for with the Internal Revenue Service.
So just to give us an example of some data, this is looking at information on automobile parts and accessory stores at the national level. So in the nation there are 37,560 automobile parts and accessories stores that pay their employees about $9.6 billion worth of annual payroll and employ about 351,000 workers. So on average, those businesses pay their employees about $27,345 per year. Of all of those businesses, the vast majority of them are classified legally, as a C Corporation. We can see that 23,000 of the 37,000 establishments are C corporations. They account for the lion's share of the payroll and the employment.
However, we can notice that in terms of the payments of average payroll per employee it's actually better to work for a business that's classified as an other noncorporate legal form of organization, presently 33 of them in the nation, but they pay their employees nearly double what the C corporations do. Looking at the business size data we can see that small businesses really dominate in this industry. There's 10,897 businesses that have fewer than five employees, a little over 12,000 that have five to nine employees, and about 12,142 that have ten to 19 employees, which is the largest of those categories. So if we had to think about sort of the optimal size, if I was going to grow my business, that magic size of ten to 19 employees might be just about perfect. That size pays their employees the most in terms of the number of employees and their annual payrolls. But again, we see an interesting finding here.
Those really, really large automobile parts and accessories stores that have between 100 and 249 employees, there are 29 of them in the US, I would love to find where that mega automobile parts store is. It probably is just a goldmine of information to work on your old car. They pay their employees on average about $45,000 a year; so quite a bit more. Now, the second program is non-employer statistics. You may be wondering non-employers, what are those? Non-employer businesses are what we typically think of as self-employed people. Just like the County Business Patterns program, non-employer statistics publish data annually. These are businesses that file not the payroll tax form but instead file their business income on the 1040 Schedule C or schedule SE.
Like the employer data in the County Business Patterns, we publish information on number of businesses. We call them firms here. But this program does actually have information on revenue. The data publish at similar levels of geography. We don't go down to zip code and congressional district in the non-employer statistics program. And there are some size and legal form organization type data available here as well. Now you may be wondering, I wonder how important these non-employer businesses are in this industry? And that's a really important question. If I was opening an auto parts and accessory store, comparing my business to those other employer businesses would be really important.
But understanding how many of those non-employers there might be, maybe it's - maybe they are significant. So here are some basic statistics. There's another 39,000 self-employed people. that work - that operate automobile parts, accessories, and tire stores. Most of them – 8,000 or so of them, earned less than $5000 worth of annual revenue. So there a lot of them, actually quite a high number. I was personally very surprised to see how high that number was. But these are really, really tiny businesses. So maybe for opening my automobile parts and accessory store, I don't really need to worry about these.
We can see that the vast majority of these businesses are classified as individual proprietorships which is not surprising. But those partnerships are the ones that generate on average, the highest sales per business location. So each of those partnerships generate about $167,000 worth of revenue where the proprietorships only generated about $50,000, so little tiny, tiny businesses. Now you may have noted at the very top of the slide, that the NAICS code that is shown here, 4413 is only four digits long instead of the six digit code.
Non-employer statistics does not publish the same detailed data by NAICS as the County Business Patterns does, and this is one of those examples where we don't see the full six digit detail. We have to back off to a four digit or more aggregated industry. Now the third program I want to quickly talk about, is something called the Annual Business Statistics. A lot of times I will get questions from users saying I am a woman interested in opening an automobile parts and accessories store. And I'm kind of
curious to find out how many other women-owned automobile parts and accessories stores are there; or how many veteran-owned automobile parts and accessories stores; or how many minority-owned automobile parts and accessories stores are there? The key program that provides this information is the Annual Business Survey or ABS. This is an annual program that covers employer businesses, those businesses with paid employees; it publishes statistics on the number of businesses, employment payroll, and it does actually include sales data. The data are published at the national, state, county, and even place levels but the key dimension is they are broken out by race, ethnicity, gender, and veteran status of the business owner. So this is where you would want to go to see how many other women owned automobile parts and accessories stores are there. So these data can be really valuable. To compare the demographics of my business that I'm thinking about opening,
the demographic characteristics of the industry as a whole, to see how I compare to my industry. So this slide provides a brief snapshot of just some of the selected statistics available in the annual business survey for this industry. Of the 16,625 employer, automobile parts and accessories stores in the United States the vast majority of them are owned by white, non-minority, non-Hispanic male and non-veteran business owners. We can see those rows highlighted in yellow on this slide.
However, if you look at some of the key ratios of these businesses, things like sales per business, sales per employee, sales per every dollar of payroll, so how many dollars of sales do they generate for every dollar they pay their employees and average annual payroll per employee, we see some interesting trends. For example, looking at the race breakouts we can see that Asian-owned businesses while there are few of them than White-owned businesses, they generate higher sales per employee and provide - and generate more sales for every dollar of payroll. However, the White-owned businesses tend to pay their employees better. Looking at the non-minority versus minority breakouts we can see that non-minority businesses dominate but the minority-owned businesses again, generate higher average sales per employee and average higher average sales for every dollar of payroll. And we can see similar sort of breakouts for the male/female. Again, male businesses dominate but
female businesses actually do quite well for themselves. And finally, looking at the veteran versus non-veteran, non-veteran businesses dominate, but again veteran-owned businesses generate higher average sales per employee. So these statistics can be really useful when working on a business plan or a loan application and let's say you are a female veteran and you wanted to be able to show how many of other female veteran owned businesses are there. These data can be really useful. Now you may have noticed that the Annual Business Survey covers employer businesses just like County Business Patterns. Now you may be thinking that's really interesting. In my community there are a
lot of minority and women and veteran-owned tiny, tiny little businesses, non-employer businesses. ABS covers just the employers. So where can I go to get data on the race, ethnicity, gender and veteran status of those self-employed people? Up until about a year ago you had nowhere where you could go. The latest data we had was from a survey that we conducted in 2012 called the Survey of Business Owners. That was the latest data available.
ABS came along and is now getting us annual information through 2018. But we were missing the data for those self-employed, those non-employer businesses. A couple of months ago we fixed that problem and we added a brand new survey called Non-Employer Statistics by Demographics, which is going to be our spotlight survey for today's session. Non-employer statistics publishes similar race, ethnicity, gender, and veteran status breakouts as the ABS program publishes. But it covers those non-employer businesses. The data are published not quite at the same level of industry and geographic detail as is available in the ABS. It's a little bit less, so you only have national, state, and county.
And the industry breakouts are only at the two and three digit levels. So - but at least it does give you some information that helps you sort of add the self-employed people to the employer businesses, to understand the importance of minority and women-owned businesses for example, in certain industries. So for example, here is a slide looking at data on motor vehicle and parts dealers. Again, you can see the situation where we are only seeing a three digit NAICS code, 441 which is a much broader category than the more detailed six. But we can see that even in this particular industry for non-employers, non-veteran White, non-minority, non-Hispanic, and male owned non-employer businesses really dominate.
Looking at the ratio of sales per non-employer business, we see some interesting patterns there. Now some of you may have noticed for example, there are these equally categories. So for example, at the very bottom of the slide we see a breakout for a female-owned, male-owned and then equally male/female.
What that's referring to is a business that is owned by two or more people, one is a male and one is a female. That business would be classified in that particular category because it is equally male and female owned. We can see that those types of businesses maybe a business where a husband and wife own the business together, they generate more revenue per firm than their male or female-owned - solely male or female-owned business counterparts.
So we've talked about four or five programs now - County Business Patterns, Non-Employer Statistics, ABS and the NESD Program and you're probably thinking wow, that's a lot of data there. The Census have anything else? Absolutely. We publish a number of other programs that are disseminated on that Data.Census.gov platform that Caleb talked about, that provides information for this particular industry that we might want to look at.
The Economic Census for example, produces basic statistics at the national, state, metropolitan area, county and place levels. But they also publish detailed product lines data, what we call industry by products, North American Product Classification System. These data can be really valuable to understand what are the products and services that automobile parts dealers sell? We have concentration ratios data that look at how much the top companies in the industry make up of the total, as well as a variety of other size breakouts and there's even more data than just simply this. And then again,
we have similar data from the older 2012 Economic Census and the Survey of Business Owners. Now normally I would have actually done a live demo for you of our Census Business Builder tool. For the sense of brevity today, since we're running a little bit long, I’m just going to quickly talk about this. But Census Business Builder is a tool that allows the user to go in and select a particular type of business and a location that they are interested in researching. So let's say - I'm sticking with Caleb's example - we wanted to research opening an automobile parts and accessory store in Orange County, Florida. I could go through these six buttons on the left hand side, see if my automobile parts and accessory store industry is listed in there. I
know it is not. So then I can type into the search box in the bottom left hand coroner, Automobile Parts, and it would bring up a list of all of the industries related to that. I could then over on the right hand side, choose Orange County, Florida.
And then when I then click on the Go to Map button, the application would then zoom in on Orange County, Florida and it would allow me to browse about 180 detailed statistics from a variety of Census Bureau and non-Census Bureau programs. This is a fantastic resource that provides access to selected statistics from the American Community Survey, County Business Patterns, Non-Employer Statistics, the Economic Census, and a variety of other programs including our International Trade Data. We have data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Department of Agriculture, etc. There's even some consumer spending data from ESRI included in this tool. Now this is a great tool that will allow users to very easily access those statistics. But
I want to reiterate something that Caleb mentioned earlier. And that is that while Census Business Builder gives you a great tool to allow you to access selective statistics from these programs, the full data set from the American Community Survey, all 3,000 or so of the data variables that the ACS publishes, are available in the Data.Census.gov application. So I always tell users start your research with your - about your business, using Census Business Builder. But eventually you will probably have to turn to Data.Census.gov when you want to dive down into either more detailed statistics than what is available in CBB. Now in addition to other - to Census Business Builder, I want to quickly mention that we also have a variety of other tools. On the left hand side it's something called time series and trend charts. This is a tool that allows you to access data from our Economic Indicator Survey
that would allow you to see how is this industry doing in the last few months? We can see for example, that for NAICS 4413 automobile parts, accessories, and tire stores, we can see this oscillating sort of cyclical nature of the way that this particular industry works over the different months. We can see in 2020 the more precipitous drop in automobile parts and accessories stores during the pandemic. But we can then see as we were exiting the pandemic, the - a real strong rebound in this particular industry. On the right hand side is a tool called USA Trade Online. That provides
information on our imports and exports data that we publish at the Census Bureau. This is a free resource available to you. it could be very valuable to a business owner who is thinking about opening a business that may someday want to export the products that they make.
So in summary, the Census Bureau does so much more than just simply count US population once every ten years. The data that we publish can be extremely useful to entrepreneurs and small business owners, as they research their markets to start up their business and even once their business is running, to help grow their business. Our economy, our communities are constantly changing and even businesses that do their research when they first open, need to periodically go back and redo that research to make sure that maybe a particular sector, a particular community that used to be small, maybe have grown now and might now be a great market for their particular products. Tools and data programs like the American Community Survey and those business programs that I talked about, provide a lot of this data that could help address some of the aspects of the markets that business owners are going to be reaching out to. And merging these data across these programs but also merging Census Bureau data with other programs' data helps paint a most - a more complete picture. As much as we love Census Bureau data at the Census Bureau, we also recognize that merging that data with data available from third patty data providers, from trade associations and even from other federal statistical agencies like the Bureau of Labor Statistics, can really be incredibly useful.
Finally, the Data.Census.gov platform is really our enterprise dissemination tool. This gives full access to nearly all of the data that we have at the Census Bureau. Certainly much more than what is available in Census Business Builder. But we really want people to use our CBB data tool because it provides access to that - those key statistics in a very user-friendly type platform. So thank you so much for taking time out of your busy schedule, to attend this webinar. Here is my contact information and then the contact information for the American Community Survey Office. Lynda, let me turn it back over to you for our final closing remarks.
Lynda Lee: Thank you Andy and Caleb, for the wonderful presentation of the topic and the demonstration of how to access the data. I want to thank everyone for your interest in our data and for attending today's session. Before we go, please take note of the contract information listed here. Included here is also information for our data dissemination specialists.
And this is for anyone who may be interested in a hands on in person training. We have specialists assigned by geography, that will be able to provide you with this service. Again, thank you for your interest. And this concludes today's webinar. Have a great day.
2021-04-24 18:05
