Today we celebrate the Day of Micro, Small and Medium Entrepreneurs. And while you’ve probably come across that phrase countless times on online portals, watching news on the TV, listening to the radio, or reading a newspaper, do you really know what makes someone a micro, small, or medium-sized entrepreneur? Entrepreneurs are divided into one of the 3 mentioned categories (there are also large entrepreneurs, but we will not address them in this paper) if at the end of the business year they do not exceed the limit indicators in at least 2 of the 3 conditions listed below in the table:
| Total assets | Income |
Average number of employees during the business year |
|
| Micro | 2.600 000,00 kn | 5.200 000,00 kn | 10 |
| Small | 30.000 000,00 kn | 60.000 000,00 kn | 50 |
| Medium | 150.000 000,00 kn | 300.000 000,00 kn | 250 |
Let’s look at the numbers
According to Fina’s 2020 statistics, 139,009 entrepreneurs operated in Croatia, most of which were micro-entrepreneurs (124,348, share 89.5%), followed by small (12,638, share 9.1%) and medium entrepreneurs (1,632, share 1.2%) while large companies are at the back (391, share 0.3%). It is also worth noting that micro, small and medium-sized enterprises represent 99% of all enterprises in the EU and in 2015 have employed about 90 million people, and you can read more about it here.
Advantages and disadvantages of micro, small and medium enterprises
Micro, small and medium-sized enterprises differ from each other, but some common advantages and disadvantages over large enterprises can be noted. Some of their advantages are:
- having shorter lines of communication and better informed employees,
- they are easier to manage because of a better overview of operations,
- they are easier to adapt to changes due to a simpler way of making decisions / the absence of a rigid structure,
- they have higher level of independence, or in other words, higher autonomy of action.
On the other hand, some of the disadvantages compared to large companies are:
- one person is often in charge of a number of activities / processes (“everyone does everything”),
- financial and human resources are limited,
- firms of this volume are more sensitive to market fluctuations.
For more information on the advantages and disadvantages of micro, small and medium enterprises, read these two papers:
Mikro i malo poduzetništvo u Hrvatskoj i Obilježja i značenje malih i srednjh poduzeća za hrvatsko gospodarstvo.
And what about BIZkoshnica
BIZkoshnica is a micro company and almost 90% of our members are also micro or small entrepreneurs. However, our size does not prevent us from taking big steps towards creating the first social-entrepreneurial coworking space in Croatia. As the legendary sentence from the cult series “Smogovci” goes: “They are small, but they are big, that is, I mean, they are no longer small, but they are big enough not to be small”.
