Economy: Small Business

It's said so often New Mexico is a small business state that it is a cliche.
The numbers come from the census Bureau. In the publication, County Business Patterns 2006 (The latest available), the New Mexico page is: censtats.census.gov/cgi-bin/cbpnaic/cbpsect.pl. For the week of March 12, 2006, there 628,681 employees working in 45,940 establishments:. An establishment is a location. A firm, Blake's Lota Burger, may have a number of locations. Thus, the firm, Blakes, accounts for a number of establishments.
We have 24,312 establishments with fewer than 5 employees, 6,171 with 10 to 19 employees, 43,774 with fewer than 50 (I added the first four groups), and 16 with more than 1,000.

Number of Establishments by Employment-size class
Total Estabs 1-4 / 5-9 / 10-19 / 20-49 / 50-99 / 100-249 / 250-499 / 500-999 / 1000 or more
45,940 24,312 / 9,159 / 6,171 / 4,132 / 1,299 / 628 / 157 / 66 / 16

Business without employees are also of interest and importance. (www.census.gov/epcd/nonemployer/2006/nm/NM000.HTM)
In 2006 New Mexico has 117,752 firms (not establishments) with no employees and with receipts of $4.5 billion.Of the 100,000-plus firms with no employees, a bunch will be doing nothing or have slight economic activity. These might be corporations still paying the corporate tax or proprietorships, businesses in the garage, doing little or nothing. However, I think my wife and I are much more representative of the nonemployee group. We both work from our home. With our combined income, we do in fact generate real economic activity and we do pay enough gross receipts tax that the amount is real money.