carcin
Carcin research · Pack 01

What hurts most, with the receipts.

The operational pain, AI adoption, and stated fears of US small business owners, assembled from published surveys. Every figure below names its publisher, its year, and links to the document it came from. Nothing here is a Carcin estimate.

Compiled 2026-06-01 27 findings · 18 publishers Back to research Raw source
57%
of US small employers report difficulty reaching customers and growing sales. Federal Reserve Small Business Credit Survey · 2025

Section 1. What hurts most

Eleven pain points, ordered roughly by how often they surface at the top of a survey. Finding customers is the one that keeps winning, and it has been getting worse, not better.

  1. 01

    Finding customers and growing sales

    The top operational challenge for US small employers. 57% report difficulty reaching customers and growing sales, up from 53% in 2023.

    Federal Reserve Banks · Small Business Credit Survey, 2025 Report on Employer Firms · 2025 · fedsmallbusiness.org

  2. 02

    Rising costs

    53% of small businesses say inflation is their biggest challenge, up from 45% the prior quarter. 88% of owners report being currently impacted by inflation.

    US Chamber of Commerce · Small Business Index, Q1 2026 · 2026 · uschamber.com
    Bank of America · Small Business Owner Report · 2025 · bankofamerica.com

  3. 03

    Labor quality and shortage

    21% to 27% of NFIB members cite labor quality as their single most important problem, at the top of the list for most of 2025. 61% of Bank of America respondents report being impacted by labor shortages.

    NFIB · Small Business Optimism Index · 2025 · nfib.com
    Bank of America · Small Business Owner Report · 2025 · bankofamerica.com

  4. 04

    Late payments and cash flow

    56% of US small businesses are owed money on unpaid invoices, averaging $17.5K each. 43% consider cash flow a problem, and 74% say it has worsened or stayed the same over the last year.

    Intuit QuickBooks · US Small Business Late Payments Report · 2025 · quickbooks.intuit.com

  5. 05

    Hours lost to admin rather than the craft

    Entrepreneurs spend roughly 36% of the workweek on administrative tasks such as invoicing, scheduling, and data entry. The average owner works 49.4 hours a week and wants to work 41.7. 63% work 50 hours or more.

    Time etc · The Big Price of Small Tasks · 2024 · timeetc.com

  6. 06

    Access to affordable capital

    51% of small businesses say current rates make a loan unaffordable. 81% of recent applicants found it difficult to access affordable capital, and of those, 49% halted expansion.

    Goldman Sachs · 10,000 Small Businesses Voices · 2025 · goldmansachs.com

  7. 07

    Collapsing confidence in marketing

    Only 18% of SMBs feel very confident their marketing is driving meaningful results, and that is with effort going up, not down.

    Constant Contact · The State of Small Business Marketing · 2025 · news.constantcontact.com

  8. 08

    Tool sprawl and fragmentation

    Companies waste an estimated 30% of SaaS spend, around $90B globally, on redundant, unused, or underused tools. SMBs in particular see a gap and buy a product to fill it, accumulating dozens of disconnected apps.

    BetterCloud · 2025 State of SaaS · 2025 · bettercloud.com
    BizTech Magazine · Why SMBs struggle with tool sprawl · 2025 · biztechmagazine.com

  9. 09

    Cybersecurity exposure

    Ransomware was involved in 88% of SMB breach incidents in the period studied, against 39% at large organizations. Breaches involving a third party doubled to 30%.

    Verizon · Data Breach Investigations Report, SMB snapshot · 2025 · verizon.com

  10. 10

    Owner burnout and stress

    72% of entrepreneurs report moderate to very high stress at work. 71% report moderate to extremely high financial stress, and 53% say that stress left them emotionally drained or burned out in the past year.

    Aflac / SUCCESS · Reporting on entrepreneur mental health · 2025 · success.com

  11. 11

    Regulatory and political voice

    86% of small business owners feel small businesses do not have enough voice in Washington. 81% say small business is not a Washington priority.

    Goldman Sachs · 10,000 Small Businesses Voices · 2025 · goldmansachs.com

Section 2

AI adoption is past the tipping point

Eight findings on how far AI has already travelled into small business. The consistent story across publishers: adoption tracks with growth, and the businesses not using it are the ones most likely to think nobody else is either.

  1. 12

    Three quarters are already in

    75% of SMBs are experimenting with or using AI. 34% have fully implemented it. 71% plan to increase AI spend over the next year.

    Salesforce · Small & Medium Business Trends Report, 6th edition · 2025 · salesforce.com

  2. 13

    AI tracks with growth

    Growing SMBs are nearly 2x as likely to be investing in AI as struggling SMBs. 78% of growing SMBs will increase AI spend next year, against 55% of declining peers.

    Salesforce · SMB Trends Report · 2025 · salesforce.com

  3. 14

    It is enhancing labor, not replacing it

    68% of small business owners currently use AI. 65% say it enhances rather than replaces their workforce. 80% report increased efficiency and 51% report better data for decisions.

    Goldman Sachs · 10,000 Small Businesses Voices, Q3 · 2025 · goldmansachs.com

  4. 15

    Marketing is the most common use case

    48% of SMBs globally use AI in their marketing. The leading applications are writing email and social copy at 37%, visual content at 29%, and data analysis at 25%.

    Constant Contact · Small Business Now Report · 2025 · news.constantcontact.com

  5. 16

    Users call it essential for reaching customers

    80% of SMB AI users say AI is essential to reaching new customers. 78% say it is necessary to meet rising consumer expectations for speed and personalization.

    PayPal / Reimagine Main Street · Small Business AI Survey · 2025 · newsroom.paypal-corp.com

  6. 17

    The perception gap

    80% of AI-using SMBs believe AI is common among their peers. Only about 33% of non-users agree. Non-users systematically underestimate how far behind they are.

    Salesforce · SMB Trends Report · 2025 · salesforce.com

  7. 18

    New businesses start AI-first

    72% of new UK SMEs plan to use AI for marketing in 2025. Newer firms adopt AI marketing at roughly 1.5x the rate of established firms.

    Constant Contact · UK Small Business Now · 2025 · constantcontact.com UK sample

  8. 19

    Reported lift in marketing return

    Marketers using AI report roughly a 70% increase in marketing ROI. AI-powered bid management is reported to reduce ad spend waste by 37% and increase ad ROI by 50%.

    PPC Chief · Marketing ROI statistics · 2026 · ppcchief.com
    Deep Marketing · Marketing budget waste · 2026 · deepmarketing.it Aggregated industry data

Small business owner behind the counter of their shop
Every number on this page is somebody's Tuesday.
Carcin · Why this pack exists Survey percentages flatten out into charts easily. Behind the 57% is an owner who finished the work, went home, and still has no idea where the next job is coming from.
Section 3

What owners say they are afraid of

Fear is not the same measurement as pain. Pain is what is happening now. Fear is what owners expect next, and it is where the surveys get uncomfortable. Some findings here restate a statistic from section 1, in the frame the publisher used.

  1. 20

    Marketing is getting harder, not easier

    Effort is up and confidence is down. Only 18% of SMBs are very confident their marketing is working.

    Constant Contact · The State of Small Business Marketing · 2025 · news.constantcontact.com

  2. 21

    Falling behind on AI without knowing it

    Non-users underestimate how many competitors already use AI. 33% of non-users think it is common, against 80% of users who know it is.

    Salesforce · SMB Trends Report · 2025 · salesforce.com

  3. 22

    Being the soft target

    Ransomware was involved in 88% of SMB breaches against 39% at large firms. Small business is where the attacks land.

    Verizon · DBIR SMB snapshot · 2025 · verizon.com

  4. 23

    Marketing budget disappearing untracked

    Companies that do not track ROI waste 30% to 40% of marketing spend. For SMEs with poor targeting, reported waste reaches 60%. Only 30% of CMOs are confident in their ROI measurement.

    Epitomise · 2024 · epitomise.co.uk
    Deep Marketing · 2026 · deepmarketing.it Aggregated industry data

  5. 24

    Cash flow shock from customers who do not pay

    56% are owed money and 47% have invoices overdue by 30 days or more. 68% of owners lose at least one full night of sleep a month over financial worries.

    Intuit QuickBooks · Late Payments Report · 2025 · quickbooks.intuit.com
    Bluevine · Small Business Burnout Report · 2024 · bluevine.com

  6. 25

    Nobody is fighting for them

    86% feel small businesses do not have enough voice in Washington.

    Goldman Sachs · 10,000 Small Businesses Voices · 2025 · goldmansachs.com

  7. 26

    The owner is the bottleneck, and the bottleneck is burning out

    72% report moderate to very high work stress. 53% have felt burned out in the past year.

    Aflac WorkForces / SUCCESS · 2025 · success.com

  8. 27

    Losing access to the data marketing runs on

    65% fear new rules could harm their business through loss of access to marketing analytics, targeted ads, or customer data.

    PayPal / Reimagine Main Street · 2025 · newsroom.paypal-corp.com

Read together, four things keep showing up

Different publishers, different samples, different years. These four findings survive all of it, which is the only reason to trust a survey result at all.

Customer acquisition is the number one operational pain

57% of US small employers say reaching customers is their hardest problem, and the figure moved up from 53% in 2023. It is not a soft complaint. It is the thing they name first when a central bank asks (Federal Reserve, 2025).

The tool stack is taxing the margin

Around 30% of SaaS spend goes to software that is redundant, unused, or underused, roughly $90B globally. Small businesses buy a product per problem and end up paying for a stack nobody owns (BetterCloud, 2025).

Effort is up and confidence is down

Only 18% of SMBs feel very confident their marketing is working. That is a measurement problem as much as a marketing problem: 30% of CMOs are confident in their own ROI measurement, and untracked spend is the spend that gets wasted (Constant Contact, 2025 · Deep Marketing, 2026).

The owner is doing it, and the owner is exhausted

36% of the workweek goes to administrative work rather than the craft, 72% of entrepreneurs report moderate to very high stress, and 53% have felt burned out in the past year (Time etc, 2024 · Aflac, 2025).

What Carcin does with this

Carcin is a growth engine for local business. It runs the channels that get a business found and chosen: search, listings, reviews, content, email, paid. The reason this pack exists is that three of the four findings above are the exact problem Carcin was built to take off an owner's plate, and the fourth is the reason it has to run without being managed.

Carcin will not fix capital access, labor supply, or federal policy. Those are on this page because they are real and because a pack that only listed the problems Carcin happens to solve would not be research. It would be a brochure with footnotes.

How to read these numbers

Four caveats that apply to every figure above. If you are going to quote one of these, quote it knowing this.

They are self-reported

Almost everything here is survey data. An owner saying that finding customers is their hardest problem is a statement about what they notice, not a measurement of where their revenue actually leaked. That is a real limitation, and it is also why the consistency across independent publishers matters more than any single figure.

The samples are not the same population

The Federal Reserve surveys employer firms. NFIB surveys its own membership. Bank of America and Goldman Sachs survey their client and program communities. Constant Contact and Salesforce survey their own market. These populations overlap but do not match, so two figures from different rows are not directly comparable even when they sound like they measure the same thing.

The year is when it was fielded or reported

Each line carries the year the survey was fielded or reported, not the year of the most recent revision. Several of these are recurring instruments and a newer wave may already exist. Check the link before you put a number in something that matters.

Two sources here are weaker than the rest

The marketing ROI and ad waste figures are marked as aggregated industry data. They come from roundups rather than a single surveyed sample with published methodology, and they are directional at best. They stay on the page because removing an inconvenient source quietly is worse than labelling it. The Federal Reserve, NFIB, and Verizon figures are the strongest here, all drawn from large published samples.

Business owner reviewing figures at a desk
A number is only as good as the sample behind it
Pack 01 · SMB pain, AI, fear · Compiled 2026-06-01 27 findings · 18 publishers

Method, and the full source index

Three rules governed what made it onto this page, and every publisher cited above is listed below with a working link.

Rule one: a fetchable source or it does not run. Every finding links to a document anyone can open. A statistic quoted secondhand from an article that cites an article was chased back to the publisher or dropped.

Rule two: the number is not separated from its source. No figure appears in isolation, on this page or anywhere else on carcin.ai. Publication and year travel with it. That is what makes it checkable rather than persuasive.

Rule three: no Carcin numbers dressed as research. Nothing on this page is a Carcin outcome, a customer result, or a projection. The only Carcin figure here is the price.

Read the numbers. Then go fix yours.

Tell Carcin what you do and where you do it. It takes the channels from there.

Usage-based pricing, starting at $19.99/mo · No contracts · Cancel anytime

Using this pack: common questions

01 Can I cite this page?
Cite the original publication, not this page. Every line names its publisher and the year the survey was fielded or reported, and links to the source document. This page is an index, not the research. If you want to credit the compilation itself: Carcin Research, What hurts most, compiled 2026-06-01.
02 How current are these numbers?
The pack was compiled on 2026-06-01. The year on each line is the year the survey was fielded or reported, not the year of the latest revision. Several of these are recurring surveys, so a newer wave may exist. Check the linked source before quoting a figure in anything that matters.
03 Are any of these numbers Carcin's own?
No. Every statistic on this page comes from a third party and carries its publisher. The only Carcin figure anywhere on the page is the price, $19.99 a month, usage based, which is a product fact rather than a research finding.
04 Which source here is the weakest?
The marketing ROI and ad waste figures, which come from aggregated industry roundups rather than a single surveyed sample. They are labelled as aggregated on the page for exactly that reason. Treat them as directional. The Federal Reserve, NFIB, and Verizon figures are the strongest, all drawn from large published samples with documented methodology.
05 Do these numbers describe Carcin customers?
No. They describe the US small business population as measured by the named publishers. Nothing here is a Carcin customer outcome, a case study, or a projection of what Carcin will do for a business.
06 Why does Carcin publish this at all?
Because Carcin's claims policy says every number on the site is a cited third party statistic, a measured product fact, or absent. That rule only means something if the citations are published somewhere anyone can check them. This page is the audit trail for the statistics used elsewhere on carcin.ai.