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In the world · Entrepreneurship · 18 September 2026

Sebrae: what sets apart firms that pass five years

Sebrae study from September 2026: 77% of small businesses that got guidance are still active after five years, versus 55% of those that went it alone.

bairogonzalez.com team, drawing on Bairo's story · Published

In September 2026, Sebrae (the Brazilian Micro and Small Business Support Service) released an impact study according to which 77% of the small businesses that received the institution's consulting were still open five years after starting, versus about 55% of those that did not have that support. The difference amounts to a 68% reduction in the risk of closing. Among individual microentrepreneurs (MEI) without guidance, only 33.7% made it to the fifth year.

What happened

The study is called Avaliação de Impacto da Consultoria Sebrae na Sobrevivência dos Pequenos Negócios: uma análise para o Brasil e suas Unidades da Federação (Impact Assessment of Sebrae Consulting on the Survival of Small Businesses: an analysis for Brazil and its states) and was carried out by Sebrae's Research and Knowledge Management Unit. Agência Sebrae published the results on September 18, 2026.

The main figures:

  • 77% of the small businesses served remain active after five years; among those not served, about 55%;
  • the gap between the two groups is about 14 points in the year of opening and reaches almost 22 points in the fifth;
  • among MEIs without consulting, five-year survival was 33.7%; with support, it came close to 65%;
  • among micro and small companies, it was about 70% without support and about 85% with consulting.

The study adds to the Sobrevivência das Empresas no Brasil (Business Survival in Brazil) series, which Sebrae calculates with data from the Federal Revenue Service. In the edition that tracked companies opened from 2017 to 2022, with more than 13 million CNPJs (company registration numbers) analyzed, about 38% of companies closed before five years. Survival varied widely by size: 57.7% among MEIs, 74.3% among microenterprises and 78.6% among small businesses.

Why it matters

The data show that a company's death in its early years is neither luck nor fate. It depends, to a large extent, on management: cash, pricing, cost control, knowledge of one's own market. These are things that can be learned.

The MEI segment is the harshest. It is the size category where most people who start alone are found, often after losing a job and with no experience in the field. According to the study itself, it is also where guidance makes the most difference.

There is a caveat for reading it. A company that seeks consulting may already be, from the start, different from one that does not. An impact assessment exists precisely to try to separate that effect, but the figure refers to averages and does not guarantee the future of any particular business.

In Bairo's view

For Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez, Sebrae's data put into numbers what he learned on his own, the expensive way. In his story, the attempts that did not survive each taught a missing lesson: about cash, about partners, about when an idea arrives too early. Every no is the ground of a yes, but only when someone stops and looks at what is inside it.

In his reading, the worst part of starting a business in Brazil is the loneliness of the decision. Those who walk alone repeat mistakes others have already made. That is why the Seventh Attempt Method has an entire step devoted to learning what you do not know, separating what you can study on your own, including Sebrae's free courses, from what calls for a partner or specialized help. The method promises neither money nor survival. It proposes reducing the number of falls needed.

The full trajectory is in The founder.

Where this meets the ecosystem

CLAIN, the AI agent orchestrator founded by Bairo, starts from the same observation: qualified guidance tends to be expensive, and those who most need it are those who can least afford it. The proposal is for niche agents to help small entrepreneurs build a cash flow, calculate prices and organize the business, always handing the decision back to a person and without replacing an accountant, lawyer or consultant.

In agribusiness, CEASA Bank, an agribusiness financial platform, proposes that every recorded sale become history, so that traders at the wholesale supply centers no longer depend on an IOU notebook to prove what they do.

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