What makes a small business resilient, and what makes it fragile?
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Small businesses carry much of the national economy, but the data describing them is usually too coarse to show which ones are exposed.
Anonymised accounting-software data was analysed across four dimensions: supply-chain connectivity within and between states, drawn from supplier and buyer addresses; the financial performance of digitally sophisticated businesses against more traditional ones; workforce composition by age and gender; and the way businesses cluster regionally.
Over-dependence on a small number of business relationships, and concentration in a single place, were the clearest sources of fragility.
The analysis produced an index of small-business health across those dimensions, which MYOB used to show customers what its services were worth to them.
