Within the Business Information section of the BREP survey, responses to questions helped create a profile of businesses operating locally as well as the jobs created by them.
| Ownership Privately owned businesses accounted for 70% of respondents with 19% having publicly owned and 11% having family owned business structures. (Figure 2) |  |
| Business Age As demonstrated in Figure 3, the community has a healthy span of businesses from young to well established levels. The majority of participating businesses have been in operation in Milledgeville-Baldwin County for up to 40 years (61.91%), with 38% operational in excess of 40 years. |  |
| Ownership Location More than half of business owners reported being involved in day-to-day operations of their business, with 36% of businesses being locally owned and operated and 64% being branches or divisions of a regional, national or international company. (Figure 4) |  |
| Labor Force Location Businesses in the City of Milledgeville and Baldwin County have the ability to pull from a labor force of nearly 210,000 employees from across central Georgia. Surveyed businesses were asked about the county(ies) in which their employees reside. In doing so, information was collected about the relationship between where individuals live and where they work. In Figure 5, the counties surrounding Baldwin County on the Georgia map, as well as whether a directly bordering or regional county, are identified in blue. For comparison, the same information from the 2013 BREP survey results and current US Census Report figures on labor and commuting patterns in Baldwin County are given. US Census Bureau results are based on data collected from individuals making up the workforce and includes information from those who work in, but may not live in, Baldwin County. Based on a larger sample size and more inclusive sampling method, US Census results are more likely to reflect an unbiased, accurate overview of the locations from which the Milledgeville-Baldwin County workforce comes. Responses from participating businesses in both 2013 and 2016 indicate Baldwin County residents make up 75% or more of their total staff. In contrast, commuting and labor patterns recorded by the US Census show a more balaced distribution of locations, from which Baldwin County workers are recruited, and spread across the entire middle-Georgia region. |  |
| Business Size by Employment Sizes of businesses interviewed ranged from two person offices to more than 500 total employees. This range in scope was intended to capture results representative of the variety of businesses currently operating in the community and provide results more representative of all businesses in Milledgeville-Baldwin County. In terms of numbers employed by each business, almost 70% of the businesses interviewed employ up to 20 employees, while 27% employ between 21 and 99 staff. (Figure 6) Large employers are in the minority in Milledgeville-Baldwin County, with just over 3% of companies indicating a workforce of 100 or more employees. |  |
| Workforce by Sector For comparison to the recent community BREP survey findings, the U.S. Small Business Administration’s recently conducted, similar study of Georgia’s employment by firm size in March 2017 found approximately 78% of the businesses in Georgia employed less than up to 10 employees, about 17% employed between 10 and 50 staff. Large employers in Georgia made up the minority of businesses in the state with just over 2% employing 100 or more people. (Georgia Department of Labor, March 2017). While large employers are in the minority in Milledgeville-Baldwin County, they employ almost 52% of the overall workforce in the Manufacturing & Distribution and Building & Construction Sectors. (Figure 7) |  |
| Gross Annual Payroll In addition to survey responses indicating more than half of the local workforce being employed in the Manufacturing & Distribution and Building & Construction sectors, those sectors generate almost three-fourths of the Gross Annual Payroll. (Figure 8) |  |