How small are South Carolina's service businesses?

The typical South Carolina service business has fewer than 5 employees. In County Business Patterns (CBP) 2023, the Census Bureau counted 77,948 establishments with paid employees in the ten service sectors we track, and 56.4% of those with a published size class had fewer than 5 people on payroll in mid-March. Another 17.5% had 5 to 9.

Put together, 73.9% of service establishments had fewer than 10 employees. The U.S. figure is 74.7%, so South Carolina's size mix is close to the national pattern. Average employment is identical: 15.8 employees per service establishment in both South Carolina and the U.S., pulled up by a small number of hospitals, staffing firms and large hotels.

That average is misleading for most readers. The median service business is much smaller than 15.8 people, and a team of 20 is larger than about 86% of service establishments in the state.

Size depends heavily on the sector. Real estate is the most small-business-heavy: 92.8% of South Carolina real estate establishments had fewer than 10 employees, with an average of 3.9. Finance and insurance (86.6%), professional, scientific and technical services (85.3%) and other services, which include repair and personal care (84.1%), follow.

At the other end, accommodation and food services has only 41.6% of establishments under 10 employees, because restaurants and hotels need staff on every shift. Health care and social assistance sits in between at 65.2%, with practices, clinics and home health agencies mixed together.

Three sectors stand out, and the subsector mix in CBP explains each one.

Finance and insurance in South Carolina is more small-office-heavy than the U.S.: 86.6% of establishments have fewer than 10 employees against 82.9%, and the average is 10.7 employees per location against 14.9. Two things drive it. Offices are smaller in nearly every subsector (insurance agencies average 5.5 employees in South Carolina against 8.9 nationally). And nondepository lenders, such as consumer finance and installment loan offices, make up 18.2% of the state's finance establishments against 8.8% nationally; those offices average 7.6 employees.

Arts, entertainment and recreation runs larger. Only 67.6% of South Carolina establishments have fewer than 10 employees, against 75.4% nationally. Golf courses and country clubs are 10.1% of the state's recreation establishments, twice the U.S. share of 5.0%, and they average 46.6 employees each. Performing arts and spectator sports, which are mostly small, make up 27.5% of the sector in South Carolina against 40.8% nationally.

Accommodation and food services also runs larger: 41.6% under 10 against 47.7% nationally. Hotels and motels are a bigger share of the sector (9.7% against 7.6%), and South Carolina restaurants average 20.5 employees against 18.4. Administrative and support services shows the biggest gap in average size (44.1 against 29.8), driven by staffing agencies and large contract service firms, while its share of small establishments matches the U.S.

Some, but less than many expect. Across all industries, the share of establishments with fewer than 10 employees ranges from 68.2% in Greenwood County to 83.2% in Allendale County. Among the 16 counties with at least 100,000 residents, it ranges from 68.4% in Sumter County to 76.9% in Beaufort County.

Regional hubs with hospitals, manufacturers and government offices, such as Sumter, Florence and Richland, have the lowest small-business shares. Fast-growing suburban and coastal counties, such as Beaufort, Lancaster and Dorchester, have the highest, which fits places where new residents bring demand for many small local services at once. In every large county, though, at least two in three establishments have fewer than 10 people.

Most South Carolina businesses have no employees at all. The SBA Office of Advocacy's 2025 Small Business Profile for South Carolina counts 530,402 small businesses, 99.4% of all businesses in the state. Of those, 440,037 have no employees, 79,440 have 1 to 19 and 10,925 have 20 to 499.

SBA also reports that small businesses employ 863,326 people in South Carolina, 42.9% of the state's employees. Those SBA figures use 2022 data and count firms (companies), while CBP counts establishments (locations), so a business with three offices is one firm and three establishments. The two sources answer different questions and should not be added together.

Use the size bands as a benchmark. In South Carolina's service sectors, 10,464 establishments had 20 or more employees in 2023, about 13.6% of the total, and 3,056 had 50 or more. Only 1,011 had 100 or more.

Each band brings different operating needs. A team under 5 usually runs on the founder's attention and a shared inbox. Between 5 and 19, work starts to be split across roles, and the cost of a missed handoff rises: a lead nobody followed up, a job nobody scheduled, an invoice nobody sent. At 20 and above, a business needs documented processes, a single customer record and reporting that does not depend on one person pulling numbers.

• Under 5 employees (56.4% of service establishments): focus on being discovered and answering every inquiry.
• 5 to 9 (17.5%): set up a shared CRM and a standard intake and follow-up process.
• 10 to 19 (12.5%): write SOPs, assign ownership of each stage and track response times.
• 20 to 49 (9.6%): add dashboards and regular reporting so managers can run their areas.
• 50 or more (4.0%): integrate systems across locations and departments.

Growth from one band to the next is where systems matter most. A ten-person team that still runs on memory and text threads will feel each new hire as added friction. A team that moves to shared tools before it needs them can add people without slowing down.

Monvell works with service businesses at each of these stages, from setting up a first CRM to building reporting for multi-location teams. The Diagnose step starts with where your business sits today and what the next band will require.

Dataset: U.S. Census Bureau County Business Patterns 2023, county file (cbp23co.txt, released June 2025). Service sectors are NAICS 51, 52, 53, 54, 56, 61, 62, 71, 72 and 81, the same definition used across Monvell's South Carolina research. State totals sum all South Carolina county rows, including establishments CBP lists as statewide; U.S. totals sum every county row in the file.

Method: for each sector we summed establishments, March employment and the employment size-class columns (under 5, 5 to 9, 10 to 19, 20 to 49, and 50 and up, combining the larger classes). Shares use establishments with a published size class (77,128 of 77,948 service establishments in South Carolina). Average size is employment divided by establishments. To explain sector gaps we repeated the calculation for 4-digit and 6-digit subsectors within NAICS 52, 71 and 72. SBA figures are quoted from the SBA Office of Advocacy's 2025 South Carolina profile. County shares in the county section come from Monvell's derived file data/areas.json, built from the same CBP 2023 county file, and cover all industries.

Limits: CBP covers employer establishments only and counts locations, not companies. Employment is the mid-March pay period and includes part-time staff; values are noise-infused for confidentiality. Size classes are based on employment before noise is applied, so totals can differ slightly from the sum of size classes. CBP excludes most government employers, farms and private households.