Each Hour of Outside Advice Raised Small Business Revenue Up to 5.2%. The Median Owner Used Two.

Let me be straight with you. Most owners would rather grind alone than ask for help. New data says that habit is expensive.

Scott Kaplan, an economist at the U.S. Naval Academy, and Ryan Raimondi just released a working paper built on every interaction in the Northern California Small Business Development Center network from 2006 through 2023. Every meeting. Every consulting hour. Revenue and headcount over time.

The problem with research like this is obvious. Motivated owners go looking for help, so of course they do better. Kaplan and Raimondi got around it by using center openings and closures, which moved advisors closer or farther away for reasons that had nothing to do with the owner.

The finding: each additional hour of consulting raised a firm's annual revenue by 3.6% to 5.2% and employment by 1.6% to 2.9%. The median firm in the data used two hours a year. Two.

Here's where most people get it wrong. They think advice has to be big to matter. It doesn't. One hour with someone asking hard questions about your numbers moves revenue.

Think about it like this. If you're an agent doing $150,000 in GCI, a 4% lift is $6,000 a year. From one extra hour of someone else's brain.

Distance mattered too. When a center ended up 20 miles closer, owners used more consulting time. Friction kills good habits, even free ones.

Your move: book one hour this month with someone who'll look at your P&L and not flinch. A coach, your broker, a CPA, your local SBDC. Put it on the calendar today, before you talk yourself out of it.

Originally published by Scott Kaplan and Ryan Raimondi on arXiv (working paper, July 2026). Read the full piece here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07849