New Zealand loves a start-up story. The garage inventor, the side-hustle-turned-empire, the no-8-wire founder who backed themselves. What we talk about far less is the statistical reality: most of those ventures will be dead within a decade, and a disturbing number won’t survive year three.
The numbers are not ambiguous. Government data shows 92% of small businesses survive their first year but only 44% remain after 10 years. For micro-firms with one to five employees, 10-year survival drops to 38%. Track the 2015 birth cohort through a full decade and the picture is starker still: roughly 27% were still operating in 2025. Three out of four gone.
The kill zone is year two, not year ten
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