2021 Start Up Outlook

Entrepreneurs expressing intent to start "four to six months out" rose to a record 25.6% of respondents, by far the highest on record, and indexing at 167% of January 2020.These are the highest levels ever recorded in the FranchiseInsights.com Small Business Startup Sentiment Index™ (SSI), collected from individuals who have recently inquired about starting their own businesses.

Franchise Insights

Forecast: Boom Coming in Business Startups Midyear 2021
The survey was conducted Jan. 21-26, 2021, in the days after the inauguration, amid news of multiple vaccine options with high efficacy becoming available to millions of Americans. 

Additional highlights:

• Future business conditions: Respondents were more optimistic, with almost 44.4% believing that, in three months, business conditions will be "better" or "much better" than now, up from 42.6% in December 2020.

• Access to funding: Some entrepreneurs' concerns are growing, with those seeing funding "harder or much harder" to obtain rising to 37.6% in January from 29.2% in December.

• Demographics: 46.3% are currently employed full-time, and a survey record of 22% are current business owners. While Gen-X (41.2%) and Gen-Y (31.8%) are the highest percentage of survey respondents, "Baby Boomers" at 23.5% continued the surge first seen in December as a share of respondents, mostly taking share from the Millennial cohort.

"The pool of entrepreneurial talent has never been stronger, and Baby Boomers are having another boomlet," says Hunter Stokes, president of FranchiseVentures. "The interest expressed by so many current business owners is encouraging."

Download a copy of the January SSI report here. See excerpts from prior SSI™ surveys and subscribe to receive the Small Business Startup Sentiment Index™ monthly report when it is released.

The Small Business Startup Sentiment Index™ is based on a monthly survey of individuals who have recently inquired about businesses or franchises for sale on the digital assets of FranchiseVentures.

About Franchise Insights
A unit of FranchiseVentures, Franchise Insights provides research and intelligence to help the franchise industry and investors understand and meet the needs of budding entrepreneurs who want to own their own businesses. With a vast and growing proprietary data set of U.S. franchise inquiries, we use the tools of data science to make inferences and discover best practices to foster the growth of small businesses.

FranchiseVentures is the leading demand generation platform for aspiring business buyers and franchisees to thousands of growing franchise systems in the United States and Canada. Its franchise lead generation brands include Franchise.com, FranchiseSolutions.com, FranchiseGator.com, FranchiseOpportunities.com, FranchiseForSale.com, SmallBusinessStartup.com and BusinessBroker.net, and together they provide the largest aggregation of prospective business and franchise buyers in the U.S.