The past couple of years have been tough on businesses, but it looks like small businesses are making a comeback.
Data from the Secretary of State's Office analyzed by the CT Data Collaborative found that there were more than 47,000 new business registrations in the state in 2021 - that's the most in a decade and over a year of increase of 20%.
Connecticut's Small Business Development Center, which provides free advising, said there's been an explosion of new businesses, even doubling the number of people that they're helping to get their ventures off the ground.
NBC Connecticut's Kevin Nathan talked to Matt Pugliese, the associate state director of the Business Development Center. He explained what the reason for the surge might be.
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Matt Pugliese: "There's people that kind of did a refocus over the last two years and decided, you know, this is the right time for me to, you know, get out and kind of take the leap and take things into my own hands. And then there's the people that say, you know, we need a second or third line of income in our home to be able to make ends meet. So, it's really all over the place, as they're more interested, a particular sector of the economy, some sort of industry, maybe manufacturing, restaurants or something else... The thing that's really interesting is retail is the number one area that we're helping support. And then service businesses, things like nail salons, hairdressers, those types of personal services - that's the second largest sector that we're seeing."
Kevin Nathan: "Retail Matt, how in the world does a small retail business compete with the big guys like Amazon?"
Matt Pugliese: "Right? Well, it's a surprise, you know, our team besides just helping people get started, we've also spent a lot of time supporting businesses as they really get on to e-commerce, as they look at digital marketing strategies and other ways to engage with customers. And I think that's one of the lessons that our team really preaches to clients, whether they're new to business or they've been in business, it's about resiliency. And, you know, we get through the latest variants, but we don't know whether there's going to be a new COVID or there's going to be something else. And businesses really need to kind of take a moment to set, you know, expectations, look at where they were, learned some lessons and say, 'okay, how can we be prepared for the next challenge that might cause us to shut down for a period of time? What lessons can we learn in e-commerce, digital media and digital strategies?' and that way, that's something our team supporting so that, you know, retail can happen, even if you're a mom-and-pop Main Street store."
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Kevin Nathan: "Finally, when you say help those businesses, how do you help?"
Matt Pugliese: "The way that we help is that we're a technical service provider, so, we're really making sure that a business approach is starting up with the right order of operations, you know, they're registering with everything that needs to be registered, that they're filling out forms properly and they're not jumping into things and wasting time and wasting money. Another way that we help is we help them accessing capital, whether that's startup capital or if it's an existing business that is looking for, loans to grow."
