Highlights from our interview with Jeff Burdett, Texas State Director of the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB)
Q: Lone Star Standard
What is NFIB and who are your members?
A: Jeff Burdett
Over 80 years, NFIB has been the voice of small business. And that’s in all 50 states and in Washington D.C. We have 21,000 members just in Texas and almost 300,000 nationwide. We’re a very unique organization in the fact that we have a cross-section of the economy that most business organizations don’t have. Our members range from agriculture to manufacturing, restaurants, you name it. And that’s everywhere from a very small startup business to a company that may have been around for 100 years and is a family-owned business.
We try to tie together our advocacy, political, and grassroots programs to ensure elected officials know who we are, what we do, and why it’s important.
As far as the definition of small business, we represent small and independent businesses who are not a publicly-owned entity. However, I will tell you this. Our average sized business that is a member of NFIB is between 8 and 10 employees. And 60% of our business have five or fewer employees. We represent mostly very small businesses.
Q: Lone Star Standard
What is the general state of small business and what are the major issues your members are facing?
A: Jeff Burdett
Well, let me tell you a little about our small business economic trends report that just came out here in the last couple of days. For more than 50 years, our NFIB research center releases a Small Business Economic Trends report. Those are released every month and it’s the gold standard of measurement of the small business economy. In fact, people ask us all the time about the economy and we can point to this report because of our large membership and cross-section of the economy.
On a high level this month, the Small Business Optimism Index decreased again, and that makes the 27th consecutive month that we’re below the 50 year average. It’s actually the lowest level this month since December 2012.
I think it’s been mostly on the downward trend with a few ups and downs, as you can imagine, month to month. Over the last two years, what we’re seeing is our business owners can consistently point to a couple of issues and it’s inflation and labor shortages.
This most recent report said that inflation was their single most important business problem. And that seems to be consistent each month. There are a lot of other issues that you can see in this report that are the reason these businesses are not optimistic, such as labor quality, which is still an issue out there.
Q: Lone Star Standard
What was your biggest legislative success of 2023?
A: Jeff Burdett
The Texas Regulatory Consistency Act was a great bill. House Bill 2127 by Representative Burrows and Senator Creighton. What it did was provide regulatory consistency by preempting some of the local regulation in areas where the Texas legislature or the federal government regulations were already in place.
It was especially hard for our businesses operating in multiple jurisdictions to navigate these complex and obviously contradictory schemes which was making it very, very difficult out there. So anything we can do to help small businesses lower those regulations and lower the administrative costs is very helpful.
Jeff Burdett is the Texas State Director of the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB), an association of small businesses in the United States, formed to advance the interests of small business at the national, state, and local levels.
This interview transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Listen to the full discussion here: https://texas-talks.simplecast.com/episodes/ep-16-jeff-burdett.
