What Matters Most to America’s Small Business Owners



  1.  Customers who appreciate what we do
  2.  Keeping customers we have from leaving
  3.  My employees
  4.  Freedom
  5.  Keeping customers happy

According to The Guardian Life Index: What Matters Most to America’s Small Business Owners, a comprehensive and methodologically innovative new study, customers, employees and themselves are what matter most to small business owners and comprise the three key pillars to their success.

This innovative small business research study, commissioned by the Guardian Life Small Business Research Institute and fielded in May 2009, is based on a 21-point scale (from +10 to -10) that measures the positive and negative intensity of responses to a vast battery of issues. This small business resource provides 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 7 are rarely seen for matters other than family or religion, according to The Guardian Life Small Business Research Institute.

What Matters Most to America’s Small Business Owners
  1.  Customers who appreciate what we do (5.8)
  2.  Keeping the customers we have from leaving (5.6)
  3.  My employees (5.5)
  4.  Freedom (5.3)
  5.  Keeping customers happy (5.2)
  6.  Whatever matters most to our customers is what matters most to me (5)
  7.  Being able to make my own decision (4.9)
  8.  Finding some way to be noticeably different from competitors (4.9)
  9.  Quality of my staff (4.7)
  10.  Setting my business apart from our competitors (4.7)
  11.  Figuring out ways to take advantage of any economic condition (4.7)
  12.  Creating a positive working environment for all (4.6)
  13.  Giving our employees reasons to feel better about being part of our team (4.3)
  14.  Being able to have the satisfaction of creating something of value (4.3)
  15.  Doing something for a living that I love to do (4.2)