Back on June 30th the UK Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) released some stats showing that sentiment in the UK small business sector is improving. In summary:
A comparison of FSB data collected over the past ten months suggests that the economic position small businesses are in is starting to improve since a low point at the end of last year.
And a couple of specifics:
- 23% of small businesses are now reporting an increase in trade, up from 16% in February
- The proportion of small businesses highlighting the cost of finance as a concern has fallen to 25% from a high of 40% at the end of last year
- Confidence is now pretty high – with 57% saying they are ‘quite confident’ and 68% planning to grow over the next six months
This is all good to hear, and very welcome news. A small caveat is appropriate though – the FSB’s members are in general smaller businesses with smaller aspirations than those that most of us work with (nothing wrong with that at all, and there may be a lot to envy about it), but it would be wrong to expect a one-to-one mapping of their prospects with those of the tech startup community.
I promised to blog this a couple of weeks ago, so apologies for the fact that the news it is a little old, but the data is still interesting and I’m keen to make amends.
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