Today, I am feeling vindicated.

In fact ... no, I'm feeling more than vindicated. I'm feeling just a little bit smug.

Possibly you remember me venting in this space a few weeks ago about people who call themselves small business advocates but who unapologetically hold microbusinesses in utter contempt.

These are the folks who claim that microbusinesses are unworthy of the attention of policy makers, because they don't do things that are good for the economy the way larger small businesses (the ones focused on growth) do.

Microbusinesses, they say, don't create a lot of jobs and don't generate enough in receipts to make for significant Treasury revenues. They just generally don't do things (like focus on growth) that are good for the economy. Therefore, they don't matter. Q.E.D.

If I listened to those people and stopped covering microbusinesses, then I probably would have skipped this week's lead story. I would have been writing about something else or, even if I had noticed the new research, I would not have considered what it says about the smallest size classes of businesses to be especially important.

I would have missed the part noting that business growth research that excludes micros "may be incomplete or distorted."

I'm almost certain I would have missed the observation, encapsulated in just a couple of paragraphs, that microbusiness employers of the very smallest classes are the only firms that experienced consistent employment growth that increased over time [their emphasis, not mine].

And I would undoubtedly have glossed over the part about how small business success seems to be a function of slow, steady growth while avoiding episodes of contraction and not exploding out of the gate with fists full of VC dollars.

Microbusinesses don't matter, huh? Guess again.

Fortunately for me, I didn't follow that particular piece of advice. So, I get to cover small business research that says, in essence, ‘Microbusinesses do matter. We've proved it.'

And that means that I don't have to.