Risky business: 44% of small firms reach Year 4

By Maureen Farrell

updated 3:02 p.m. ET Feb. 16, 2007

The numbers aren't pretty.

While some two-thirds of small firms make it past the two-year mark, just 44 percent can hack it for four years, according to the latest data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And by "hack it," we're just talking survival rates here: Plenty of those "survivors" are choking down ramen noodles to keep the lights on.

If those odds don't scare you off, consider too that some industries may be inherently tougher to crack than others. Your friends might think that you rival Mario Batali in the kitchen, or that you can go sole for sole with the likes of Kenneth Cole. But the sober truth is that it takes more than talent to run a restaurant, a clothing boutique and a host of other ventures. Sadly, some of the most enticing industries are also the riskiest.

Good data on business failures are hard to find. At first blush, BLS figures suggest that failure rates are consistent across industries. Yet those industry groupings are very broad, capturing the entire universe of small companies in just 10 general buckets. For example, restaurants are lumped into the larger "leisure and hospitality" bucket, including more stable outfits like hotels. Some economists chalk up failure rates to other factors, such as location, the experience level of management teams and whether companies are able to nab venture funding.

But a closer look by the folks at Fair Isaac, a business research firm and father of the FICO credit score, suggests that some industries are indeed riskier than others.

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To assess an industry's inherent risk, Fair Isaac collected reams of financial data from various internal and other proprietary sources, including credit-tracking agencies such as Dun & Bradstreet and Equifax. "The weird thing about industry classification is that, depending on the sources we look at, there are varying rates of risk," says Cordell Wise, a Fair Isaac product manager.

To be sure, choice of industry is not the only predictor of a startup's chances for success. Fair Isaac weighs up to 20 variables when modeling a small fry's risk profile. After a business has been up and running for more than two years, Fair Isaac drops the industry variable from its risk model altogether; at that point, things like cash flow and debt load become more critical factors.

Still, out of a universe of 89 industries (still somewhat broad, but a lot better than the BLS classifications), 10 stood out as the riskiest. Five of them follow.

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