Initial Research

52% of small and micro businesses in Northern Ireland believe cost pressures will impact their business's future sustainability.
Only 36% of small and micro businesses in Northern Ireland reported an increase in profitability in 2023.
20% of small and micro businesses in Northern Ireland are seeing their business contract, and 10% are in difficulty or at risk of closure.

-Michael McQuillan, CEO of Enterprise NI

In March 2023, the majority of businesses (89% or 70,795) in Northern Ireland were micro businesses (less than 10 employees). Just over 2% (1,655) of businesses had 50 or more employees.
Four in ten businesses in Northern Ireland (42% or 33,645) had a turnover of less than £100,000, whilst just over one in ten (12% or 9,315) had a turnover in excess of £1 million.

The barrier to success most frequently cited by Northern Ireland micro-businesses was the extent of competition in the market (48 per cent).
Four-fifths of NI micro-businesses said their key priority was to ‘keep their business similar to how it operates now’. Only around a fifth of business leaders aim to build a ‘national or international business’. For most of these firms stability dominates growth in terms of ambition.
78 per cent of micro-businesses in NI are family-owned and in the vast majority of cases the founder is still involved in the business. Around half of all microbusinesses in NI are home-based. Family-ownership is more important in Northern Ireland than elsewhere.
27 per cent of NI micro-businesses reported introducing a new or significantly improved product or service over the three years prior to the survey compared to 32.5 per cent in the UK as a whole. This level of innovative activity in NI was the lowest of any UK region and significantly lower than that in micro-businesses in Ireland (40 per cent) and the US (36 per cent).

The rate of Total early-stage Entrepreneurial Activity (TEA) in Northern Ireland in 2023 is 9.7%, up from 8.7% in 2022.
In 2023 there was a slight increase in fear of failure, with the proportion of non-entrepreneurial individuals of working age in Northern Ireland who agreed there were good start-up opportunities but also report they are afraid of starting a business in case it might fail, raising from 60.6% in 2022 to 62.9% in 2023.