METHODOLOGY

Since its establishment in 2002, Civic Economics has conducted several studies comparing the economic impacts of independent, locally owned businesses with that of their chain competitors. More recently, they have begun to include Amazon and their ecommerce site in their analyses as well.

This report is the first in the series to focus on the impact of personal and business service providers. Through local business surveys, we were able to gather enough data to analyze the impact of two classes of service business, both of which face growing competitive pressure from non-local providers: accounting firms and fitness centers.

For the purpose of this study, local and independent business is defined as a privately held business headquartered on Cape Cod whose owners control all the financial and business decisions.

For all the Civic Economics Indie Impact studies, in each participating community, local organizers are responsible for recruiting businesses to complete a survey to quantify local recirculation of revenues. For this study Love Live Local reached out directly via email and direct mail to approximately 68 locally owned fitness centers, accounting firms, printers and insurance companies between May and August 2022 and asked for their participation in the analysis. Additionally, we included calls for participants on multiple occasions on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Linked In, as well as in our monthly email. We also reached out to every Chamber of Commerce and small business nonprofit provider across Cape Cod and asked that they share the survey with their networks.

In the end, 7 accounting firms, 7 fitness centers, 3 printers and 1 insurance company responded. The survey can be somewhat time consuming and requires an in depth look at a businesses’ books. These factors will naturally impact the survey’s response rate. Unfortunately, we could not ultimately include in the analysis printing and insurance agencies because there was insufficient data.

The essential methodology for the survey is local and independent businesses open their accounting records and demonstrate the proportion of revenue expended five categories:

1. Profits paid out to local owners

2. Wages paid to local workers

3. Procurement of goods services for internal use

4. Procurement of local goods for resale, and

5. Charitable giving within the community

For the chain competitors, the aggregate value of these is estimated from public records. The difference between these two totals captures the enhanced impact of the one or the other category of business.