91% of Triangle entrepreneurs see sales growing; 59% plan to step up hiring

RALEIGH – More than 90 percent of Triangle entrepreneurs participating in a new survey from NCSU’s Entrepreneurship Clinic are expecting their revenues to increase over the next six months. And close to 60 percent are planning to hire additional people.

Adding to the rosy outlook, nearly 56 percent anticipate that they will be increasing capital spending.

However, the percentage of firms planning to boost work forces was down 10 percentage points from the 2019 first quarter survey.

Overall, the index for the Quarterly Outlook of Triangle Entrepreneurs climbed slightly to 112.97 from 112.03 earlier this year.

Yet despite the strong positive indicators the index remains 10 points below where it stood a year ago as it did in January. The 123.80 score for Q2 2018 was the highest in the survey which NCSU launched in the fourth quarter of 2014.

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Triangle startup enthusiasm contrasts to a receive survey of chief financial officers by Duke University in which execs saw lower growth expectations for the rest of this year and a possible recession coming in 2020.

“In 2018, and now in 2019, we’ve seen a very slight increase in the outlook index from Q1 to Q2. But, the real story this quarter is in the increase in optimism about sales, and the decreases in optimism for capital spending and employment growth,” said Lewis Sheats, associate professor of practice in entrepreneurship in the NC State University Poole College of Management and executive director of the NC State Entrepreneurship Clinic, about the new survey.

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“Looking back at Q2 findings from 2018, we did see a slight uptick in sales optimism. And, we saw slight changes in optimism for capital spending (down slightly) and employment growth (up slightly). One possible explanation for the larger changes than usual could be the new tax code changes—but, that would need further examination and we’d need to track this possible trend, as we usually do with all these data, over time.”