Business owners in Texas a breed apart
It’s fair to say that entrepreneurship is important to the Texas ethos, bound up in history and mythology about taking risks and striking it rich. But are Texas’ business owners that different from those of the nation at large?
In some ways, yes. Using the Census Bureau’s recently released Annual Survey of Entrepreneurs for 2015, we can put together a rich picture of Texas entrepreneurs and how they stack up against those in the rest of the country.
A few points:
• 18.3 percent of Texas’ business owners were not born as citizens of the U.S.,
which is slightly higher than the national average.
• 27 percent of Texas’ businesses were minority-owned, behind only Hawaii (at 55.9 percent) and California (at 32.6 percent).
• 66.5 percent of Texas business owners did not previously own a business before they started their current one, which is significantly higher than the national average of 61.9 percent.
• Texas business owners work longer hours on average, with 27.7 percent working between 41 and 59 hours per week.
• 72.8 percent of Texas business owners founded their own business, compared to 70 percent on average. Texans were less likely to have purchased or inherited their businesses.
• Texas entrepreneurs are less likely to derive most of their income from their businesses, with 33.7 percent saying that the business was not their primary source of income, compared to 31.7 percent on average.
• Texas’ business owners are more educated, with 56.7 percent having a bachelor’s degree, master’s degree or doctorate as their highest level of education, compared with 52 percent on average.
• Texas’ entrepreneurs are both younger and older than the national average, with slightly higher shares falling under age 45 and over age 55.
• 55.4 percent of Texas businesses had websites, which is slightly higher than the national average.
• Texas businesses are slightly more likely to export, with 4.9 percent of companies sending more than 5 percent of their shipments overseas, compared to 4.3 percent nationally.
• Texas entrepreneurs are less likely on average to have been staked by personal or family savings and more likely to have received seed funding through a bank loan or government-guaranteed loan, with 20.9 percent having received startup capital through the latter two channels.
• 29.8 percent of Texas businesses are family-owned, which is higher than the national average.
• Texas employers are less likely to offer health insurance, tuition assistance, contributions to retirement plans, or profit sharing and stock options. But they are significantly more likely to offer paid holidays, vacation, and sick leave, 52.2 percent to 48.6 percent.