I looked back at every business I wrote about in 2019

And Wausau is bucking the trend in business success

A common saying people will often hear is something along the lines that most businesses fail in their first year.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics has actual numbers. In the first year, approximately 28% of businesses fail. At five years, that number jumps to 48% and at 10 years out the number hits 68%.

That could be unpacked further. Is a business that runs for 10 years and closes a failure? It could be. It could also have simply run its course and the owners just wanted to move on to other things. The business itself could actually be successful, but the owners are burned out. That makes classification difficult.

But a story I have been wanting to do for some time is take a snapshot of Wausau businesses and see how they are doing five years later. Did Wausau fare better than the national trend? Worse?

So, I made a list of all the business stories I covered in 2019 and methodically looked at whether or not they were still in business.

This was surprisingly more difficult to do than you might think. Unless the business clearly said on its website or social media that it was closing, I wanted a confluence of confirmation about whether or not a business was in fact closed. I took as signs a business saying it was permanently closed on Google, when the last time the business posted on social media, whether its website was still operational, etc. I also used Google images to help. If I knew a business had been at a specific location, and when I look at that location, another business is there, I think it’s safe to say that business is no longer operating. (Coupled with other clues, and double-checking that they hadn’t just moved.)

Still, there were about five of them I was unsure about, so I got in the car and drove to them to see for myself. In all but one case I was proven correct, that the business had closed. But any good journalist knows you always verify, and over-verifying is always better than under-verifying. In fact, before publishing I got in my car again to double-check a few I wasn’t sure about.

For one, since there is no physical location, I reached out. That would be the BetterBin app. Their social media has gone dark, but the app is still available in the app store. But I also hadn’t heard much following a partnership the app had made with the city of Wausau. (And some other local communities.) Turned out, there’s an interesting story there.

I also excluded some. One by a high schooler, since it seemed premised on her being in her high school. Some were trend stories and not really on a specific business.

What’s left is an interesting snapshot of businesses that launched in 2019 and how they’ve fared. It’s not a perfect list. There is a selection bias toward new businesses that will have broad interest. So the selection might exclude, say, a new accounting firm, or a plumbing business, since those were less likely to hit the radar at City Pages.

But either way, the results are interesting.

Wausau is bucking the trend

As I started working through the list, it was starting to look like there would be a high attrition rate, since many of the businesses I or a freelancer wrote about in the earlier part of the year ended up closing.

But the results ended up surprising me.