I’m Gus. I’m the Scherer ‘mascot’ if you like. You know, of Ask Gus, He Knows fame? And while I’m really just an amalgamated character, I’m hoping we can be friends. And by friends I mean, I hope you’ll read my blog posts and be in awe of my answers.

Today, I got the following question from Jodi Womack of The Womack Company.

How many US businesses are owned by married couples?

Gracias!!!!

(see how polite Jodi is?)
Well, we checked it out and voila!

Back in 2006, the Indy Star wrote:

“Copreneurs,” as they’re called, are a rapidly growing segment of business partnerships. The number of husband-wife companies has more than tripled since 1990, topping 3.6 million, according to the U.S. Census. Glenn Muske, co-author of a 2002 study titled “Copreneurs as Family Businesses,” believes the number of copreneur firms is “greatly underestimated.” He said couples are leaving corporate jobs and opening businesses, but for reasons beyond the bottom line.

This (even older) article from Inc. How To Work (If You Must) With Your Spouse writes:

Though there are no accurate statistics about what happens when spouses try to run a business together, expert estimates are grim: “Only 5% of couples can make all-in partnership work,” says Azriela Jaffe, a frequent reporter on the phenomenon of entrepreneurial couples and author of Permission to Prosper: What Working Wives Crave From Their Husbands, and How to Get It. (”All-in” co-ownership is tougher than a partnership in which one spouse is a subordinate who’s helping out.)

We may need to wait for the next Economic Census for an update, but I’d go with 3.6 million for now! So Jodi, you are not alone!

I’ve been hearing a lot of good things about Keyword Discovery as an SEO tool. When I was checking it out, I looked to see what they report as the top 10 general searches. The chart below is a simplified version of their data:

So here’s what struck me. Over 13 million people plug myspace into a search engine? That means that there are 13 million people who don’t know that adding .com to that and putting it in the address bar is the way to go? Same with the 13.5 million that type google in and the almost 9 million that type yahoo in and the over 7 million for ebay and 5 million for youtube. Is it just me that thinks this is odd?

The 5.6 million who actually typed myspace.com into a search engine may be the ones I wonder about the most though.

Scratch that. Actually I wonder about the millions of people who type porn and sex into a search engine with no qualifying words. I’m guessing that these folks figure it out, though. Seems to be a category of search where users are motivated to improve their search results.

Last week’s (KidPost) survey asked: How important is homework?
More than 350 readers responded.

Very important               27.2%
Important                        26.3%
Somewhat important    19.6%
Not important                26.9%

I wonder if the results would have been different with a different sample base. I’m just saying.

Note: The Post freely admits this is not a scientific survey! I just found this humorous.

A loyal reader asks: Please don’t think less of me, but I am absolutely totally bored by economics. So imagine my joy when my boss asked me, yes me, track economic data to crosstab (not literally) with our business trends. I don’t know where to turn. And make it easy, please. I don’t have the stomach for this.

Seriously, this is nothing to fret about. Check out Economagic.

It’s a breeze. And you’ll look smart as a whip.

You’ll find free, easily available economic time series data useful for economic research. It provides easy access to large amounts of data, and you can quickly get charts of that data. There are more than 200,000 time series for which data and custom charts can be retrieved.

The majority of the data is USA data. The core data sets involve US macroeconomic data (that is, for the whole US), but the bulk of the data is employment data by local area — state, county, MSA, and many cities and towns.

Now go be a star!