[Home](https://stoneforgegroup.com/) · Research 01 – Research # What federal business data says about owner-led services firms Original analysis of federal business data. Every figure is sourced to a named dataset and year, the method is stated in full, and the underlying tables are published so anyone can check them. ## Executive summary This work draws on five federal datasets – the Census Bureau’s Annual Business Survey, its Business Dynamics Statistics, the Annual Business Survey’s Characteristics of Business Owners component, County Business Patterns, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages – and asks a plain question of each: what does the data actually show about owner-led services firms as they get larger and older, once the comparisons are made carefully. [The Leverage Gap](https://stoneforgegroup.com/research/the-leverage-gap/) measures revenue against payroll across seven employment-size bands in four sectors; [Firm Size and Firm Age](https://stoneforgegroup.com/research/firm-size-and-age/) measures firm size against firm age across eleven age bands in five sectors. Two of these five studies point in different directions on the question an owner actually asks. Revenue per dollar of payroll in professional services falls from $3.01 in the 5-to-9-employee band to $2.38 in the 250-to-499 band, about 21% less, while construction’s ratio holds close to flat across the same range. Firm size, meanwhile, rises only modestly with age: professional services firms average 19.2 employees at age five and 25.0 at age twenty-six or more, about 30% more, once the population is held to firms with five or more employees throughout. Widen the population to every firm and the rise looks far larger, but only measured from age 0 – a baseline the firm-size study’s own data shows is unusable, since firms with five or more employees average more at age 0 than at any later age. Measured from age 5 instead, the same baseline as the 30% figure, the all-firms rise is about 3.4 times, not the 8.5 times an age-0 comparison shows; population composition accounts for a substantial part of that remaining gap without fully explaining it. **Revenue per Dollar of Payroll.** Revenue per dollar of payroll is total revenue divided by total payroll, a measure of how much a business generates for every dollar it pays its people. [Full entry →](https://stoneforgegroup.com/glossary/#revenue-per-dollar-of-payroll) Read together, these figures say that getting bigger in professional services buys real headcount, slowly and only partway, while returning a smaller multiple of revenue for every payroll dollar spent. Neither pattern says a given firm cannot grow past it; each describes what the federal data show for the population it actually contains, not what any one firm's future holds. Both studies compare different firms at different sizes or ages in the same year, not one firm followed as it grows – so neither can show a trajectory, only a snapshot. Current size is not peak size, and survivors of acquisition or failure are not a random sample of everyone who started. Read the studies themselves for the qualifications each figure carries. ## The studies - [The Leverage Gap](https://stoneforgegroup.com/research/the-leverage-gap/) In professional services, revenue per dollar of payroll falls about 16% between the 5-to-9-employee band and the 50-to-99-employee band – roughly $1M to $15M of revenue per firm – while construction’s ratio holds close to flat across the same range. Most of the decline happens inside that range rather than out among the largest firms, and firms in the larger bands keep slightly more per head above payroll than firms in the smaller bands do, at a thinner multiple of it. - [Firm Size and Firm Age](https://stoneforgegroup.com/research/firm-size-and-age/) Among professional services firms with five or more employees, the share still under 20 employees falls from 79.2% at age 5 to 70.8% at age 26 or more, and mean firm size rises from 19.2 to 25.0 employees – about 30%. Across all firms, the honest same-baseline comparison – both measured from age 5 – shows a bigger rise, about 3.4 times; only a comparison anchored at age 0, a baseline this study’s own data shows is unusable, reaches the far larger 8.5 times sometimes quoted. Population composition accounts for a substantial part of the gap between 3.4 times and 30%, not all of it. - [What the Local Market Pays](https://stoneforgegroup.com/research/what-the-local-market-pays/) Professional-services pay per employee sits below the Florida and national figures in Sarasota, Manatee and Charlotte counties alike, each county checked on its own rather than combined into one figure – $71,742, $64,670 and $62,132 against Florida's $88,164 and the nation's $105,185. A second, independently built federal series confirms the same pattern. - [Who Owns These Firms](https://stoneforgegroup.com/research/who-owns-these-firms/) Owner age varies far more by subsector than the flat NAICS 54 figure of 52.6% suggests: owners aged 55 or over run 39.4% in computer systems design against 62.8% in accounting, tax preparation, bookkeeping and payroll services – a spread of more than 23 points inside one industry code. The study also reports owner tenure and states plainly what this data cannot join to firm size, or say about what an owner intends to do next. **NAICS (North American Industry Classification System).** NAICS, the North American Industry Classification System, is the code set federal statistics use to group businesses by what they do. [Full entry →](https://stoneforgegroup.com/glossary/#naics) - [Florida Owner-Led Firms](https://stoneforgegroup.com/research/florida-owner-led-firms/) Florida’s owner-age gaps against the national picture, in all five sectors checked, are smaller than the combined standard error of the two figures being compared – 50.8% to 57.1% of Florida’s owners are 55 or over. That is a failure to detect a difference, not proof the two are the same, and Florida’s sample is part of the national one besides. Florida does show a genuine aggregate difference in revenue per employee, but it runs in different directions band by band, and the study states plainly which comparisons its state-level sample size can and cannot support. ## Where the data comes from The data comes from five federal sources, all free and public: the **Business Dynamics Statistics** from the Census Bureau counts firms by age, size and industry back to 1978; the **Annual Business Survey** reports revenue, employment and owner characteristics; its **Characteristics of Business Owners** component reports owner age and tenure separately from the firm-level survey; **County Business Patterns** reports establishments, employment and payroll down to the county level; and the Bureau of Labor Statistics' **Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages** reports wages built from unemployment-insurance records, also at the county level. The computed tables are published here as CSV: [revenue and employment by sector and size, 2022](https://stoneforgegroup.com/assets/data/leverage-by-sector-size-2022.csv), [firm size by sector and age, 2023](https://stoneforgegroup.com/assets/data/plateau-by-sector-age-2023.csv), [establishment pay and size by county, 2022](https://stoneforgegroup.com/assets/data/local-pay-by-county-2022.csv), [owner age and tenure by sector, 2022](https://stoneforgegroup.com/assets/data/owner-age-tenure-2022.csv), and [owner count by number of owners, 2022](https://stoneforgegroup.com/assets/data/owner-count-2022.csv). Not every figure on these pages comes from one of those files, though: the Bureau of Labor Statistics' QCEW figures and several of the Florida-specific Annual Business Survey figures are one-off pulls, verified live against the Census or BLS API rather than written to a CSV – each study's own Methodology and sources section states which figures this applies to and gives the exact query to reproduce them. The firm-age table is analyzed in full in [Firm Size and Firm Age](https://stoneforgegroup.com/research/firm-size-and-age/), above; the county-level pay tables in [What the Local Market Pays](https://stoneforgegroup.com/research/what-the-local-market-pays/); the owner age and tenure tables in [Who Owns These Firms](https://stoneforgegroup.com/research/who-owns-these-firms/). ## What this data cannot tell you Stated plainly, because a number without its limits is not evidence. **Current size is not peak size.** The data records where a firm is now, not the largest it ever was. A firm that reached forty people and fell back to eight is counted among the small ones – so these figures show which firms *are not past* a threshold, never that they *never got past* it. **Survivors are not a random sample.** Firms that grow substantially often get acquired, which removes them from the independent-firm counts. Some of the pattern may reflect who is left to count. **These are different firms, not the same firms followed over time.** Comparing a five-year-old firm with a thirty-year-old one in the same year is not the same as watching one firm age. The same applies to comparing a small firm with a large one: it is a snapshot of different firms at different sizes in one year, not one firm growing. **Records begin in 1978.** Firms older than the series cannot have their true age measured, so figures for firms past twenty-six years old are only reliable from about 2004 onward. **These figures are a sample, not a census.** The Annual Business Survey covers roughly 230,000 employer businesses drawn by stratified sample, not every firm in the country, so every figure carries sampling error on top of the limits above. ## Citing this work Stoneforge Consulting Group, *What federal business data says about owner-led services firms*, 2026. Published 7 August 2026. Analysis of US Census Bureau Business Dynamics Statistics (2023) and Annual Business Survey (2022). https://stoneforgegroup.com/research/ ## Related These studies answer *how much*. For *why*, see [why a business feels stuck](https://stoneforgegroup.com/questions/the-plateau/) and [the diagnosis behind a plateau](https://stoneforgegroup.com/questions/why-has-my-business-plateaued/).