From COVID’s uncertainty, a stronger small-business culture emerged in Nevada

In the middle of the pandemic, when it seemed like business after business in Las Vegas was closing, Upbeat Health was just getting started. Today, the Summerlin clinic’s mobile wound-care team has grown nearly tenfold, one small example of how Nevada’s entrepreneurs turned crisis into opportunity.

Between 2019 and 2022, 1.7 small-employer businesses were created in Nevada per 1,000 people, according to a recently released UNLV white paper. That’s the third-fastest rate in the nation, researchers with the university’s Center for Business and Economic Research found.
CBER Director Andrew Woods says it appears that many of the small businesses created amid the pandemic are still operating today — just like Upbeat Health. What started as a business with an owner and three employees in 2022 has grown to 30 people filling a small office.

“Our health care has definitely changed. I think (Las Vegas) is a growing city,” said Jennifer Dao, director of operations at Upbeat. “We want to be able to be a part of that. … That’s why we have five to six different service lines.”

The boost in small businesses — a nationwide trend that was especially pronounced in Nevada — helped drive the state’s recovery from the pandemic, the paper found. CBER Associate Research Director Jinju Lee said the recovery among small businesses was evenly distributed, showing some signs of increased economic diversification.

“The distribution among the large employers and medium (employers) is going to be much more toward what we know and love in Nevada, which is the leisure and hospitality business,” Woods said.

But the growth in small businesses in Nevada came from health care, professional and business services, and real estate, among others, he said.

Small employers made up 45% of jobs in 2022, the UNLV paper found, up 2.2 percentage points from 2019. And as of 2024, 40% of employers created their company after the pandemic, according to CBER.

Small businesses’ recovery also outpaced larger firms, rebounding from their pandemic-induced dip by 2022 while larger firms were still recuperating their losses, Lee said.

“It goes to show that the economy in Nevada is one that is more sophisticated than we give it credit for, and that there is a lot of entrepreneurial activity here,” Woods said of Nevada’s recovery.

But Woods and Lee’s research notes that the exact opposite occurred during the Great Recession, another 21st-century global shock to the economy.

From 2007 to 2009, when the country was in a recession, initial listings filed with the Nevada secretary of state fell from a little under 70,000 to around 50,000. It then largely flatlined from 2010 until the beginning of the pandemic, according to the data from the secretary of state.

The UNLV paper also notes that business closures did not rise in the same way they did in the aftermath of the Great Recession.

So what was different this time?

Woods described a perfect scenario of high job loss, people needing to make an income and the fact that the government had “de-risked” failure through stimulus infusions and programs to keep businesses open.

Upbeat Health, like many businesses created after the onset of the pandemic, didn’t directly receive that government support, but Woods said the country’s small businesses were helped by improved economic conditions across the country.

“People wanted to get out. People had excess savings — they were willing to spend a lot of money,” Woods said. “And that really contributed then to this high growth and then maintaining of these small businesses. They didn’t just shut down when the pandemic ended.”

For Dao and her colleagues at Upbeat Health, that meant there were enough patients — and enough confidence in the economy — to keep adding staff and services even as the pandemic emergency faded.

Lee also said the mass adoption of remote work led to people starting their own businesses, believing they could cover the entire country instead of just the region where they live.

E-commerce retail sales spiked during the pandemic and have only become more popular, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

However, those factors could be said for much of the country. The paper notes that Nevada was likely also helped by its low taxes, lax regulatory burden and “supportive business climate.” The study additionally credits the Nevada Small Business Development Center.

However, the creation of a small business doesn’t necessarily translate into an improved financial situation.

For nonemployers, businesses with the owner as the only employee, the transportation and warehousing sector made up 27.1% of the state’s growth from 2019 to 2022, according to the UNLV paper.

That category includes Uber and Lyft drivers, though Lee said CBER doesn’t track how much of the increase came from such gig work.

Compared with the rest of the country, the white paper noted, Nevada favors nonemployer firms over those with employees. That “may be partly due to easy access to gig-working opportunities” with Nevada’s tourism-centric economy, CBER wrote.

Despite the growth, Woods emphasized that the government’s expensive response to the pandemic shouldn’t be replicated when there isn’t a crisis, calling it a “one of a kind” event.

“What’s more important and interesting now is, how do these businesses perform as time goes on?” Woods said. “What you really hope is that there’s going to be a good handful who continue to grow and succeed and then emerge, no longer as a small business, but as a large business one day that employs lots of workers.”

“That’s where we start to make a real dent in how we measure economic diversification, because we need some big winners outside of leisure and hospitality,” he added.

kyle.chouinard@gmg vegas.com / 702-990-8923 / @Kyle_Chouinard