EO-Atlanta Members Feel Cheery While NFIB Members Grouse

By Carol Tice
Exclusively for BVR Times

Here's an interesting puzzle: Members of the National Federation of Independent Business have pretty much never been so gloomy about the economic outlook as they are now. The results of a recent Discover survey of small-business owners mirrored the sentiment over at NFIB, where only 15 percent of survey respondents said they plan to make a hire in the coming months.

Meanwhile, over at the Entrepreneurs' Organization in Atlanta, members are quite a bit cheerier. Their second annual Economic Survey, which fully half the membership responded to, showed 86.7 percent of survey respondents plan to hire additional workers this year.


Nearly 60 percent said they planned to make hires by the end of the current quarter. And 34 percent said they'll be hiring steadily throughout the year! Nearly 60 percent are all fired up and ready to enter new U.S. markets this year.

Whaaaa?

What accounts for the radical difference in the outlooks of members of the two organizations? It's a little bit of a mystery.

Interestingly, last year the NFIB actually did a study of whether its members' opinions were markedly different from that of the general small-business population, and found that for the most part they were quite similar.

So why do EO-Atlanta members have a whole different attitude? Based on statistics the two groups issue about their member makeup, I'm going to make an educated guess: They're younger, perhaps due to the group's roots as YEO, the Young Entrepreneurs' Organization. The average EO-Atlanta member, the group reports, is 40. At NFIB, close to 70 percent of members are over 45.
EO national members also appear to be more successful – the average member's business has on average 185 employees. At NFIB, 42 percent of members have fewer than five workers.

Perhaps, having lived through fewer economic calamities, the younger EO business owners are less scarred, less scared by what they see out there. Maybe they're a little less beaten-down. Or maybe they feel more secure because they've got more solid success behind them. They have more of a financial base from which to take risks – the average EO-Atlanta owner's business has more than $40 million in annual revenue.

Whatever accounts for it, let's hope the EO-Atlanta study is a better indicator of what truly lies ahead in 2010. A small-business hiring spurt would really help our economy.