Featured in this report: Employee engagement research
Establishing credible numbers
The Part 1 starting point was to establish a credible number of likely business ownership transition points in the next five to 10 years.
To achieve that within the scope of the project, researchers targeted the area of the economy where the highest number of impactful ownership transition points are likely to occur: in privately-owned small and medium-sized businesses (10–249 employees) where the owners are approaching or at retirement age (43 and older).
Based on government statistics, roughly 67% of all UK business owners are aged 43 or over and there are roughly 260,000 SMEs in the UK with 10-249 employees. On that basis, the project set out to better understand the intentions of owners at roughly 174,000 SME businesses employing over 7.9 million people (that is approximately 12% of all UK firms with employees and 34% of all UK employees).
To achieve this, 500 individuals were surveyed who were aged 43 or older and held a higher than 10% stake in privately-owned SMEs (10-249 employees) that were broadly representative of the whole cohort by size of business, sector and geography. (From this point, ‘owners’ refers to individuals with these characteristics.) We then extrapolated our survey findings to drive out estimates based on actual government-reported business numbers.
DJS Research is an employee-owned company and specialises in employee engagement research projects.
