New Research Shows Middle-Market Private Equity Is Major Source of Job and Sales Growth

May 19, 2015, CHICAGO—The Association for Corporate Growth® (ACG), the global organization focused on driving middle-market growth, today announced the release of the second iteration of GrowthEconomy.org. The website details the impact of private equity investment throughout the United States. Importantly, and for the first time ever, the updated GrowthEconomy.org reveals how private equity investment is the leading driver of jobs and sales growth in the middle market.

"With refreshed data from 1995-2013, GrowthEconomy.org shows that private-capital backed middle-market companies outperform other companies on sales, which drives employment growth," said Gary A. LaBranche, CAE, president and CEO of the ACG. "Private equity investment has a positive, powerful and profound impact on the U.S. economy and specifically, on the middle market."

The middle market plays a crucial role in the U.S. economy. According to the National Center for the Middle Market at The Ohio State University, the middle market represents 47.9 million employees and one-third of American GDP. The middle-market is defined as companies with revenues between $10 million and $1 billion.

The newly released GrowthEconomy.org shows that:

• The middle market represents 1 percent of all business establishments, but provides 26.5 percent of all jobs in the United States.
• From 1995 through 2013, U.S. private equity backed companies grew jobs by 83.7 percent while all other U.S. companies grew jobs by 27 percent. Well over three-quarters of this growth comes from the middle market.
• From 1995 through 2013, private equity backed companies grew sales by 134 percent, while the U.S. grew sales by 31 percent. More than three-quarters of this growth comes from the middle market.

"Coming out of the recession there was little jobs or sales creation of any kind," said Gregg Cole, research director for the Business Dynamics Research Consortium. "Through the Growth Economy analysis of 55 million companies, it’s clear that private equity (particularly middle-market private equity) helped companies weather the storm."

Two independent data sets are used in GrowthEconomy.org: the National Establishment Times Series (NETS) database, a catalog covering 55 million unique establishments with more than 300 data fields and 18 years of historical information; and PitchBook, the leading provider of independent private equity research and data. Access to the NETS database was contributed to Growth Economy through the University of Wisconsin Extension Division for Business and Entrepreneurship’s Business Dynamics Research Consortium (BDRC). Access to the PitchBook data set is made possible through a strategic relationship between BDRC, PitchBook Data, Inc. and ACG.

GrowthEconomy.org is unique in that it doesn’t present a static report, but allows the user to determine the parameters of data sorts to compare the performance of 80,000+ private-equity backed companies against more than 55 million other companies between 1995 and 2013. Data may be sorted by all 50 states, 365 Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSAs) and 435 congressional districts.

"Using the largest data set available on the U.S. economy and the most inclusive database on private capital, every search on GrowthEconomy.org produces data and graphs driven by the user’s unique search criteria. This results provides increased transparency and visibility to the role that private equity plays in communities throughout the United States." said LaBranche.

For more information, register for a Middle Market Growth Conversation on Wednesday, June 3 at 1:00 PM ET: ACG's New Growth Economy Research - How the Middle Market Drives Your Local Economy."

Contact:      Kristin Gomez, VP, Communciations & Marketing
Telephone:  312-957-4268
Email:          kgomez@acg.org  

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About Association for Corporate Growth
Founded in 1954, ACG has 59 chapters across the globe. ACG’s worldwide network comprises 90,000 professionals within the middle market, including 14,500 members who serve as the investors, lenders, owners, executives and advisers to growing middle-market companies. ACG’s mission is to drive middle-market growth.

About Business Dynamics Research Consortium
The Business Dynamics Research Consortium is a public-private, non-profit, nonpartisan research consortium devoted to the study of business performance and economic growth. Operated as a research consortium at the University of Wisconsin - Extension, committed to creating data resources and data-driven insights that stimulate research on individual business performance and its impact on overall economic growth.