The Guardian Life Index Fact Sheet



About The Guardian Life Index

The Guardian Life Index: What Matters Most to America’s Small Business Owners is an ongoing research initiative that provides a better way to understand how America’s small business owners think and act, based on a new, proprietary research methodology – The Index of What Matters Most™.

The Guardian Life Index overcomes the limitations of traditional small business research that narrowly view some 20 million individual small businesses as a monolithic entity. Instead, The Guardian Life Index examines small business owners by means of a multifaceted matrix of key industry sectors and owner profiles, quantifying the intensity of their goals, value systems, interpretations and decision processes. As a result, this study offers a unique view into key small business trends and a richly intricate knowledge base of insights and perspectives about what matters most to the people who build and sustain millions of individual small businesses.

Methodology

  • Polled more than 1,100 small business owners representing:
    • 13 small business industry sectors
    • 9 geographic regions
    • 4 key states (California, Texas, New York and Florida)
    • 2 major DMA’s (New York and Los Angeles)
  • Fielded in May, 2009
  • Based on a 21-point scale (from +10 to -10), it measured the positive and negative intensity of responses to a vast battery of issues, providing key small business trends and an in-depth understanding of what matters most to the people who build and sustain some 20 million individual small businesses that collectively account for 50 percent of U.S. gross domestic product and 44 percent of the nation’s payroll
  • Positive intensity numbers above 3 are highly significant and indicate strong feelings
    • Intensity numbers above seven are rarely seen for matters other than                         family or religion.
  • Negative intensity numbers, even slightly negative ones, are highly significant and indicate strong passions.
  • Methodology employed an online survey of 25 minutes’ duration covering 135 Index questions, as well as an extensive battery of industry sector and small business owner profile questions
  • Based on the nature of this study, The Guardian Life Small Business Research Institute is able to dive in and pull out other data points of interest