Where are the jobs? 2014 INC 5000 List might provide some answers…
What do Domino’s Pizza, Microsoft, Timberland, Tough Mudder, Intuit, Vermont Teddy Bear, E*Trade, Lending Club, Morningstar, Oracle, Fuhu, Cold Stone Creamery, Under Armour, and GoDaddy have in common? They all have appeared on Inc Magazine’s INC 500 list of the fastest-growing American private companies. Looking at the last year’s INC 5000 list might help us draw employment insights and identify best industries and places to look for a job. By definition, these company are experiencing tremendous growth, and as such, could be representative of future job opportunities in the US. In addition, according to Forbes , small businesses added over 65% of the net new jobs in the past two decades. So, where are the jobs?! Based on INC 5000 data, Chicago, IL employs over 5% [56,813] of all INC 5000 workers. Another 14% [144,847] of INC 5000 employees work in California. Top 3 industries by employment include: Human Resources, Business Products & Services, and IT Services . Together, they are responsible for almost 400,000 jobs, or 38% of the grand total.
To be fair, even with combined revenue of $ 215 Billion, the list of 5,000 companies does not sound large enough to draw any general conclusions about overall US job market. As luck would have it, the US Census Bureau published 2012 Statistics of U.S. Business Employment last week, which helps put a perspective on this matter. In fact, according to this report, there were 5,726,160 non-government firms in US, which employed 115,938,468 people. With 1,043,420 workers, INC 5000 represents less than 0.09% of all US companies, yet 0.9% of all employees . In other words, roughly one in a hundred American workforce members is employed by one of these five thousand companies.
This finding indicates that while still relatively small, on average, INC 5000 companies are larger in size [208 employees to be precise] than a typical US enterprise with only 20 employees. Not only 63.5% of INC 5000 employees worked for a large enterprise (having at least 500 employees), such companies comprised 6.4% of the total, comparing with only 0.3% US companies having the distinction of being a large enterprise. These workers benefited financially,since very small enterprises’ employees earn only 70 cents on a dollar in compensation comparing to the large-enterprise workers. [$36,912 vs $52,554 as stated in the US Census report.] Similarly, while 90% of all US companies employ less than 20 people, only 19% of the INC 5000 do. Please refer to the graphic above for further details.
There is no surprise to see that California, being the most populous US state, employs the highest number of INC 5000 workers, followed by the second most populous state – Texas. The third largest state by population takes the eighth spot on INC 5000 list, perhaps due to to the large retired demographic in Florida? New York duly earned its fourth position, while Michigan surprisingly takes the fifth spot, being only the tenth most populous state in the nation with somewhat crumbling economy at that. At the same time, Wyoming did not even make this list.
As far as the cities are concerned, taking a closer look at Chicago uncovers that this third most populous city in the nation; is home to 95 INC 5000 companies. However, just one of them – SeatOn Corporation with 28,726 staffers, employs more people than ALL of the 178(!) INC 5000 companies headquartered in New York City. City of Pittsford, NY is home to 29,405 people, as well as the second largest company on the list – Sutherland Global Services, which employs… 30,000 people. Clearly, we need to be cognizant of the fact that larger companies’ employees might not all be working in the same city, state, or in the case of Sutherland, country.
As I mentioned already, top 3 industries on the list are: Human Resources, Business Products & Services, and IT Services . The first two industries hold true for Illinois. However, if you were to use the interactive Tableau data visualization I created below, you would see, that the top 3 spots in California are taken by: Security, Health, and Software. Texas has a different mix of industries altogether: Food & Beverage, Energy, and Health. Would you share your findings from this visualization in the comments section of this post?
