The ClarIQ Benchmark Brief
An annual look at what healthy actually looks like in businesses doing $1M to $20M. The first edition is out: four numbers, every one naming its source, and the move each one demands. Sign up below and it arrives by email.
Owners of businesses this size have almost nothing to compare themselves to. Public company data is irrelevant at this scale, and the surveys that do exist are thin, stale, or built to sell something. The brief exists to close that gap: what the money numbers look like at this size, where the healthy operators separate from the strained ones, and what to do about the line that stings. As the monthly reporting practice grows, future editions add anonymized, aggregated comparisons drawn from that work, with one standing rule: every number names its source.
What the first edition covers
- Cash: how many days the median business survives if revenue stops this morning
- Speed: the customers you already paid to win, lost to slow follow-up
- Margin: the slow bleed you cannot feel month to month
- Exit math: what a business this size is really worth when the question turns real
The headline numbers, sourced
Findings and their sources
| # | Figure | What it says | Source and base |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 27 days | If revenue stopped this morning, the median business survives 27 days on the cash it holds. Restaurants and retail sit near 19 days, professional services near 31. Half of all businesses sit below those lines. | JPMorgan Chase Institute, Cash is King. Roughly 600,000 businesses. |
| 2 | 100x | A lead answered within 5 minutes is roughly 100 times more likely to be reached, and 21 times more likely to qualify, than one answered at 30 minutes. The average company takes 42 hours, and nearly a quarter never respond at all. | MIT-led Lead Response Management study; Harvard Business Review. |
| 3 | 77% | Rising costs of goods, services and wages were the most commonly reported financial challenge, named by 77 percent of employer firms, and growth expectations fell to their lowest level since 2020. | Federal Reserve Banks, 2026 Report on Employer Firms. |
| 4 | $37B | SBA 7(a) lending ran near record levels in fiscal 2025, roughly $37 billion across roughly 78,000 loans. At this size financed buyers are the market, and financed deals survive or die in underwriting rather than at the letter of intent. | SBA public loan-level 7(a) data, data.sba.gov. |
Basis: every figure is published by the named source and linked above; none is a ClarIQ estimate and none is modelled. Where a source states a median, the median is quoted and the base is named. Figures are as published at the date of each report.
The brief itself goes further than the numbers: what each one means at your size, and the working standard we hold client businesses to on each. That part arrives by email.
Straight talk on how it was built: first editions have to earn trust, so this one uses only named public research and our own stated standards. Nothing in it is invented, and nothing is a client's private data. It reads as education, not lending, legal, or investment advice, and no client will ever be identifiable in any edition.