National Small Business Week. Entrepreneurs are the future!

When I wrote my Ultimate Online Customer Service Guide, I mentioned that small business often has the edge over large. Being able to change quickly and stay closer to customers and employees are a couple of the main advantages. This week is National Small Business week and I'm glad that that small businesses are getting their due.

A few facts have stuck in my mind (these are from the Small Business Administration (SBA):

• Represent 99.7 percent of all employer firms.
• Employ just over half of all private sector employees.
• Pay 44 percent of total U.S. private payroll.
• Have generated 64 percent of net new jobs over the past 15 years.
• Create more than half of the nonfarm private gross domestic product (GDP).
• Hire 40 percent of high tech workers (such as scientists, engineers, and computer programmers).
• Are 52 percent home-based and 2 percent franchises.
• Made up 97.3 percent of all identified exporters and produced 30.2 percent of the known export value in FY 2007.
• Produce 13 times more patents per employee than large patenting firms; these patents are twice as likely as large firm patents to be among the one percent most cited.

I'm proud to be a small business entrepreneur and it's nice that our nation chooses to salute the backbone of our economy.