Majority of KC businesses predict growth in new year

Kansas City metro business executives indicated they are optimistic about what 2022 holds for their businesses.

A recent survey on business statistics and trends in different markets including the Kansas City area 

Across all markets, 46 percent of survey respondents reported better-than-projected results in 2021, and 20 percent said their businesses performed worse than projected.

In the Kansas City Metro area specifically, business leaders faced a talent shortage, with a supply shortage and remote workforce. In terms of overall business performance, the percentage of responding companies whose performance exceeded expectations jumped 11 percentage points over the previous year to 58 percent and 13 percent reported performing below expectations in 2021.

Diversifying the client base will remain the top priority for Kansas City Metro businesses in 2022, with increasing the workforce and creating a process for generating innovative business ideas also ranking highly among strategies to be implemented in the coming year. Finding new talent and higher inflation are expected to be the top challenges in 2022, followed by the continued impact of the pandemic.

With more cautious predictions compared to a year ago for 2021, fewer business leaders project better performance in 2022 (69 percent) than those who said the same last year (84 percent). Twenty-eight percent expect the same performance in 2022 as 2021.