ccording to the US Small Business Administration (SBA) definition of, well, its chief concern, a business counts as “small” if it employs fewer than 500 people. Up to 499 workers on the payroll, still small. Same category as an owner-operator sole proprietorship with, on paper, zero employees.

By the SBA definition, 99.1 percent of all businesses in Alaska are small. That leaves about 650 that employ 500 or more people and are, therefore, not small.

Alaska Business magazine’s Corporate 100, which ranks the state’s largest private-sector employers, included 42 small businesses with fewer than 500 worldwide employees in the April 2024 edition. An attentive reader might ask, “How can small businesses rank among the largest in Alaska when there are 650 non-small businesses to cram into the Corporate 100?”

The Corporate 100 survey is a rough count, but it’s not that rough; if there were double, triple, sextuple the number of qualified companies hiding somewhere in Alaska, we’d have heard about them. Conceivably, the missing 550-odd non-small businesses have large worldwide workforces but smaller crews in Alaska. For instance, engineering firm Jacobs just made the Corporate 100 cutoff with the 100 Alaskans on its team, even though it employs 60,000 total. Similarly, large national and global companies with double-digit staff numbers in Alaska could, therefore, explain the non-small businesses that don’t show up in the Corporate 100.

That resolves the large business conundrum. For details about small businesses, this edition of Alaska Trends looks at the 2023 Small Business Profile by the SBA Office of Advocacy. It counts 55,293 businesses “without employees,” which in the farming and fishing sector is practically all of them. The profile also notes that Alaska small business employment grew 17.5 percent from 1996 to 2020, outpacing the national rate. That’s no small feat.