How many businesses are there in Columbus?

How many people in the U.S. are employed by "small businesses" as opposed to large businesses?

• I often hear the quote that "It is the small businesses in America that employ most of the people."  I'm just wondering what the actual numbers are, percentage wise; and what qualifies as a small business?

• Answer:

  The SBA has somewhat good answers on this. - http://www.sba.gov/advocacy/7495/8420 Employ just over half of all private sector employees. Pay 44 percent of total U.S. private payroll. Have generated 64 percent of net new jobs over the past 15 years. Create more than half of the nonfarm private gross domestic product (GDP). There is a more complete breakdown here: http://www.sba.gov/sites/default/files/files/us10.pdf  That shows that of 120.9 million people employed in the private sector, (21.6 million employed by the government) 59.7 million were employed by small business, here defined as business with less than 500 employees. The SBA defines a small business according to this table: http://www.sba.gov/sites/default/files/Size_Standards_Table.pdf