★ an index from federal data ★
The federal government counts every business with an employee. Hold those counts against population, county by county, and a picture appears: across twelve east-central counties the rate of named trade businesses — landscaping, salons, washing, hauling — runs far under the state's own average. The grass still gets cut and the hair still gets done. The work is here; the names are missing.
businesses short of the state rate · 12 counties · 2022
In 24 county-trade combinations below, the federal count of employer businesses is exactly zero — including every trade in Blackford County except salons, and pressure washing in eight of the twelve counties. Nobody believes the driveways of Henry County have never met a pressure washer. Somebody does that work — without a business name, without a books entry, without anything to hand a son.
Indiana — 6.8 million people, a mower in every shed — has five employer home-and-garden-equipment repair businesses on federal record. Five. The other several thousand people doing that work every spring are doing it informally: cash, favors, a bench in the garage. That is the size of the gap between work that exists and businesses that exist.
Employer businesses on federal record (2022), with the shortfall against Indiana's state rate shown in red.
| County | Landscaping & mowing | Salons | Pressure washing | Hauling & waste |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Blackford11,905 residents | 0 −4 | 0 −3 | 0 | 0 |
| Delaware112,183 residents | 45 | 13 −11 | 0 −3 | 0 −3 |
| Fayette23,342 residents | 3 −5 | 0 −5 | 0 −1 | 0 −1 |
| Grant66,020 residents | 10 −13 | 6 −8 | 0 −2 | 0 −2 |
| Hancock83,119 residents | 54 | 16 −2 | 10 | 0 −2 |
| Henry48,829 residents | 17 | 7 −3 | 0 −1 | 0 −1 |
| Howard83,574 residents | 33 | 16 −2 | 0 −2 | 5 |
| Madison131,524 residents | 61 | 15 −13 | 6 | 0 −4 |
| Randolph24,407 residents | 8 −1 | 0 −5 | 0 −1 | 0 −1 |
| Rush16,661 residents | 3 −3 | 0 −4 | 0 | 0 |
| Shelby45,213 residents | 18 | 5 −5 | 3 | 3 |
| Wayne66,337 residents | 19 −4 | 4 −10 | 0 −2 | 0 −2 |
0 = no employer business of that trade on federal record in the county · −n = businesses short of the state's per-capita rate. Full table: demand.csv — CC-BY, free to cite, link appreciated.
Establishment counts: U.S. Census Bureau, County Business Patterns 2022 (employer establishments, NAICS 561730 landscaping · 812112 beauty salons · 561790 other services to buildings · 562111 solid waste collection · 811411 home & garden equipment repair). Population: Census Population Estimates, July 2022 vintage. Rate = establishments per 10,000 residents; a county's “missing” count = the state rate applied to county population, minus the actual count, rounded, floored at zero.
The honest caveat, which is also the finding: CBP counts businesses with paid employees. One-person operations without payroll aren't in it. So a zero doesn't mean the work isn't happening — it means the people doing it hold no registered, named, hand-downable business. That's the gap this index measures.
the whole point of a barn raising is turning work you already do into a business you actually own: your name, your .com, an Indiana LLC, funded by your own people in $25 boards. Naming it costs nothing and takes ten minutes.
Read the plain deal