Few small businesses plan to hire
Many small business owners in the United States are reluctant to hire more employees in the near term as economic uncertainty and sagging sales continue to put pressure on company balance sheets, the latest index on small business optimism from the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) shows.
Of the 2,077 small businesses in NFIB’s membership surveyed, the number of companies planning to increase staff is down two percentage points to just nine percent, while 12 percent plan to reduce their workforce over the next three months. The report also shows employment has been reduced for the fifth month in a row with an average reduction of 0.1 workers per company.
“Small businesses seem to have the right number of employees,” said Holly Wade, senior policy analyst at the NFIB. “They’re breaking even. But until they see a pick-up in consumer spending there’s no reason to hire.”
Economic uncertainty is affecting consumer confidence and in turn small businesses. Twenty-six percent of business owners surveyed said poor sales are their main concern.
Wade doesn’t see anything inspiring more consumer confidence in the near future. “We don’t see anything on the horizon that would get small businesses to hire more and consumers to spend more,” she said.
At the same time, Sageworks has seen an increase in private company profit per employee with average profit per employee rising by 50 percent since 2009. The profit per employee has so far been $15,000 this year.
“Private companies have seen revenue growth between four to six percent,” said Libby Bierman, an analyst with Sageworks. “The companies are growing, but they’re not adding a lot of employees.”
CIT = more bad news for small business
Just when it looked like President Obama was making some headway with small business, along comes the CIT bankruptcy train to derail everything.
Last Thursday, on Obama’s urging, the House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed new legislation that authorized more than $40 billion for loans backed by the Small Business Administration. It was the relief U.S. small businesses had been hoping for. But just 72 hours later the good news was tempered when CIT Group Inc. – the SBA’s top lender – filed for bankruptcy protection. Now all that new federal money may be loaded onto a train missing its locomotive.
CIT’s failing could leave as many as a million small and medium-sized businesses looking elsewhere for credit in a marketplace where few banks are lending. According to the National Small Business Association, CIT lent $65 million in SBA-backed loans for the first six months of 2009; just 1 percent of all SBA loans issued. That figure was down dramatically over 2008, when CIT comprised 6 percent of the SBA total.
At a time when loan defaults by SMEs are rising and Equifax is reporting that small business bankruptcies are up 44 percent over last year, the CIT news is akin to a perfect storm for small business.
“It’s great that the stock market is coming back, but if you’re unemployed or you’re running a small business, the turnaround has not happened,” said Drew White, CFO for Sageworks Inc., which monitors the financial data of privately-held companies across 1,600 industries. Sageworks’s latest study found that since 2003 the debt-to-equity ratio decreased in the private sector, which might normally be a good thing, but according to White is likely the result of companies paying down debt and shrinking inventories due to slower sales and tightened credit in the recession. “It looks like there’s sort of a benchmark or a normal way that these businesses operate and they need a fair amount of borrowing capacity to do that and that has been restricted and constrained.”
Unlike Equifax, Sageworks only crunches the numbers for companies currently being audited, so White conceded the numbers are likely worse than their latest report shows. He also doesn’t anticipate a turnaround over the next couple quarters, unless the jobless rate improves and consumer confidence rebounds.
“Even if they (retailers) had a lot of access to credit, I don’t know if they’d be making a lot of big bets and say let’s go stock up with a bunch of inventory, because there’s certainly no evidence people are flocking back to buy things,” said White, who added the efforts by the government to stimulate lending are great, but it’s not a panacea. “In the long run the fundamentals of the economy have to come back: people have to be employed, people have to feel better and people have to start investing and buying. We don’t see much evidence of that.”
Anybody who didn’t see this coming over the past two years had blinders on. Between the CEO’s careless management of the company to the SBL division that would provide a loan if you could breath it is no wonder that CIT is in this situation. In an economy where even the most well run, conservative banks are struggling with their loan portfolios its no wonder that CIT is failing. I’m sick at the loss of the taxpayer’s money but why would you allow a company to form a bank holding company then receive TARP funds a couple months later….sounds like a poor credit decision on the part of the government. Unfortunately the losers here will be the taxpayers and small businesses. Shame on you CIT and the Federal Government.
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