A Small Business Trends report explores the issue of sleep and sleep deprivation among small business owners and corporate executives.

Over the past couple of years, corporate executives have been forgoing sleep at an alarming rate. Yet even so, their foolish decision to work late into the night will never be as inherently detrimental to their company’s success as a lack of sleep will be for a small business owner or first-time entrepreneur. By and large, that’s because there’s strength in numbers.

In 1999, the average new business kicked things off with 7.7 employees. According to the Kauffman Foundation, that figure has dropped to an average of 4.7 employees. In many ways, overseeing a smaller team can make for a more manageable and dynamic work environment — but it also means a lot more responsibility.

When Marissa Mayer joined scrappy start-up Google in 1999 as the company’s first female engineer, she was infamously known to put in over 130 hours per week. At the start-up level, weeks like that can seem difficult to avoid. After all, small business owners and their tiny teams must oversee a plethora of seemingly menial tasks that corporate executives are free to pass off to teams of 30 or 40 white collar worker bees.

Get the full story at www.smallbiztrends.com