Founder Data Report36.6% of Business Owners Still Own the Business They Ran Before This One. Only 8.4% Had One That Closed.
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Census asked 4.2 million owners of American employer firms what became of their last business. Four times more of them are still running it than ever lost it.
Once every few years the Census Bureau asks the owners of America’s employer businesses a question nobody else asks: is this your first business, and if it is not, what happened to the last one? In the 2023 round 4,212,412 owners answered. Just under half — 48.7% — said this is the first business they have ever run. The single largest answer among everyone else is not the one you would expect. It is not that the last business failed, and it is not that they sold it. 36.6% of all owners said the earlier business is still operating and they still own it. Only 8.4% said it had closed. The popular picture of the repeat founder — the one who tried, failed, learned and came back — describes about one owner in twelve. The much larger group never put the first one down.
- 48.7% of owners of American employer firms say this is their first business. The other 51.3% have run one before.
- 36.6% — 1,543,804 owners — still own that earlier business. It is operating right now, alongside this one.
- 8.4% had an earlier business that closed. 4.4 times as many owners are still running the old one as ever lost it.
- Of everyone with a prior business, 71% still hold it, 16% saw it close and 6% sold it.
- Women are more likely to be doing this for the first time (53.7% against 46.4% of men) and less likely to be carrying a second business.
Half have never done this before
Start with the plain number, because it sets the scale for everything else. 48.7% of the owners who answered — 2,051,500 people — are running their first business. Not their first in this industry, not their first at this size: their first, full stop. These are owners of employer firms, businesses with staff on a payroll, so almost half of the people signing American paycheques have never run a business before the one they are running now. There is no earlier attempt to compare this one to, no previous version of themselves who already made the obvious mistakes. Whatever they know about hiring, pricing, firing and cash they learned inside the business they are still responsible for.
One bar, five parts, together the whole 4,212,412. Each colour is set explicitly rather than by position, and every one is named in the legend: the two narrow segments are too thin to carry a label at this width. “Sold it” folds two published answers — bought by another company (1.4%) and bought by another individual (1.5%) — because each is under two points. A further 24,107 owners were asked and did not answer; they are outside all five shares rather than counted as a zero.
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2023 Annual Business Survey, Characteristics of Business Owners, table AB2300CSCBO, question O15 (prior business status); downloaded from census.gov on September 21, 2026. Shares are of the 4,212,412 owners of respondent employer firms who answered the question, and are owner-level, not firm-level.
The repeat owner is usually still holding the first one
Now the half who have done this before. The obvious story about them is failure and recovery, and the data puts that story in fourth place. Of the 51.3% with an earlier business, 71% still own it and it is still trading. Only 16% saw it close, and 6% sold it to someone. Across all owners the two shares are 36.6% against 8.4% — a ratio of 4.4 to one, and a gap the survey’s own standard errors put well beyond any doubt. What the question is really measuring, then, is not resilience after a loss. It is accumulation. More than a third of the people running an American business with employees are also running another one, today, at the same time. Nobody hands out a second set of hours with the second set of books.
Each row is one answer on a common 0–60% track; the orange dot is women owners, the slate dot men, and the bar between them is the difference. All three gaps clear twice the combined standard error, so all three are real. The one published answer whose gap does not clear that bar — “other”, 3.2% of women against 3.5% of men — is left out of this chart rather than drawn as a difference the data cannot support.
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2023 Annual Business Survey, Characteristics of Business Owners, table AB2300CSCBO, question O15 (prior business status); downloaded from census.gov on September 21, 2026. Shares are of the 4,212,412 owners of respondent employer firms who answered the question, and are owner-level, not firm-level.
The second business is not the sequel. It is the one that never got closed.
Where the second business is most common
The habit is not spread evenly. Real estate and rental sits at 45.4%, with accommodation and food services a little higher at 46.7% — the top of the twelve — and retail at 40.5%. At the other end sit finance and insurance at 33.8% and professional and technical services at 29.7%. The pattern underneath is what a business is in each of those trades. Where the business is an asset that keeps earning — a property, a second location, a franchise — there is nothing to wind up and every reason to add another. Where the business is the owner’s own licensed practice, there is only one of them to give, and a second one would mean being in two places at once. Six of these twelve sectors sit above the national 36.6%.
On a common 0–50% axis. Orange is the sectors above the national figure of 36.6%, slate those below it. Seven of the nineteen published sectors are not shown: each has fewer than 100,000 reporting owners and standard errors up to 6.8 points, against 0.7 at worst among the twelve drawn. The highest of the seven dropped would have topped this chart (51.8%, standard error 1.8), which is exactly why a reporting-base floor is applied before any ranking is read off it.
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2023 Annual Business Survey, Characteristics of Business Owners, table AB2300CSCBO, question O15 (prior business status); downloaded from census.gov on September 21, 2026. Shares are of the 4,212,412 owners of respondent employer firms who answered the question, and are owner-level, not firm-level.
What this means if you are the one holding both
Two numbers, put together, describe most of the people running American businesses with staff. Just under half have no prior run to draw on. More than a third are splitting themselves across two businesses at once. Neither group has the thing the advice usually assumes: a clear single subject to concentrate on and some earlier experience of how it goes. The first group is learning in public with a payroll attached. The second is choosing, every week, which of two sets of problems gets the good hours — and the honest answer is often whichever one is louder. That is the priority problem in its most literal form. It is not that the work has not been prioritised. It is that there are two lists and one person, and no framework arrives with the second business explaining which list it belongs at the top of.
All three are shares of the same 4,212,412 owners who answered the question in the 2023 survey, so they can be added and compared directly.
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2023 Annual Business Survey, Characteristics of Business Owners, table AB2300CSCBO, question O15 (prior business status); downloaded from census.gov on September 21, 2026. Shares are of the 4,212,412 owners of respondent employer firms who answered the question, and are owner-level, not firm-level.
Three limits. First, and most important, these are shares of owners, not of businesses. The survey collects up to four owners per firm, so 36.6% of owners holding a second business does not mean 36.6% of American firms have an owner who does — a firm with several owners appears several times in the denominator. Do not convert these figures into a count of companies. Second, the question covers employer firms only: businesses with at least one employee on the payroll. The millions of American businesses with no employees are outside this table entirely, and there is no reason to assume they answer the same way. Third, these are survey estimates, not a register count, and the file publishes a standard error beside every one. Every difference stated above has been tested against those errors and the one that did not clear them has been left out and said so. The figures are for 2023, the most recent year the Census Bureau has published this table for.
Frequently Asked Questions
What share of business owners are running their first business?
48.7%. In the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2023 Annual Business Survey, 2,051,500 of the 4,212,412 owners of employer firms who answered said this is their first business. The remaining 51.3% had owned a business before.
Do most repeat business owners start again after a failure?
No. Of the 51.3% of owners with an earlier business, 71% say that business is still operating and they still own it, 16% say it is no longer in operation and 6% sold it. Across all owners, 36.6% still hold an earlier business against 8.4% who lost one — a ratio of 4.4 to one.
How many business owners run more than one business?
At least 36.6% of owners of American employer firms — 1,543,804 people — reported in 2023 that a business they owned before this one is still operating and still theirs. The true figure for multiple ownership may be higher, because the question asks only about the business immediately before this one.
What happens to the businesses owners leave behind?
Of all 4,212,412 owners who answered, 36.6% still own the earlier business, 8.4% say it is no longer in operation, 1.4% say it was purchased by another company, 1.5% say it was purchased by another individual and 3.4% gave another answer.
Do women and men business owners answer this differently?
Yes, and the gaps are larger than the survey’s margin of error. 53.7% of women owners say this is their first business against 46.4% of men, a gap of 7.3 points. 33.9% of women still own an earlier business against 37.9% of men, and 7.1% of women had one close against 9.1% of men.
Published by The Lonely Entrepreneur — the community and coaching platform for entrepreneurs who are building alone. lonelyentrepreneur.com
This article is for educational purposes and is not a substitute for professional financial or legal advice.