11.5% of Service Firms at Risk of Shuttering in Two Years
Inflation is the double-edged sword bedeviling Main Street SMBs.
In the “Main Street Health Q3 2022: SMBs Battle Inflation” report, PYMNTS surveyed 533 U.S.-based businesses to gauge just how far they’ve been able to raise prices, what their business outlooks were, and how simply keeping the lights on have become more expensive too.
Of the Main Street SMBs we surveyed, 54% said they expect revenues to increase in 2022. However, that’s down from the 56% seen at the beginning of the year and the roughly 64% seen in November 2021.
As many as 60% of the businesses surveyed generating more than $1 million in revenue expect increased revenues in 2022, as do 57% of them conducting the majority of their sales through digital channels.
Approximately 12% of businesses generating less than $150,000 in sales annually told us that they are concerned about whether or not they will survive to see 2024.
The increased costs of doing business are a key factor underpinning those concerns. The data show that 37% of SMBs say inflation is their current and greatest challenge.
Certain verticals are seemingly more susceptible to the vagaries of top line and margin headwinds — so much so that they might be “somewhat less than likely” to remain open beyond the next two years.
A total of 6.8% of the firms that we surveyed had that grim outlook, up from 5.5% at the beginning of the year. Drill down a bit, and the percentage increases to 11.5% for professional and consumer services firms, up markedly from a bit more than 1% at the beginning of the year.
Get The Report: Main Street Health Q3 2022: SMBs Battle Inflation