[bpt3]

Fellow small business owner here. Just as a reminder, discussing any successful (where successful is defined as not failed) business is a lesson in survivorship bias.

Most businesses of all sizes, shapes, and forms fail within 10 years.

[lurk2]

> Most businesses of all sizes, shapes, and forms fail within 10 years.

I hear this all the time with variations to the number of years, which makes me suspect it isn’t true.

[LastTrain]

What part do you suspect isn’t true?

[lurk2]

That a majority of businesses fail over a given duration of time. It’s probably true on a long-enough timescale, but the idea that the majority of businesses fail within one year or ten just seems completely dubious. How is a business defined? How is failure defined?

[LastTrain]

You don’t need to wonder, that information is readily verifiable. Most businesses fail. https://www.bls.gov/bdm/bdmage.htm

[bpt3]

Ignoring the available data indicating that it is the case, I'm curious about why this seems dubious to you in the first place?

Starting and maintaining a functioning business is difficult; the default outcome is failure (the end of the business as an operating entity) and you have to work to prevent that from happening every day that you want to remain open.

And I've never seen a claim that the majority of businesses fail in a year. Most anecdotes say a majority fail within 5 years, which seems to be approximately correct based on US data.