The term “big surprises come in small packages” couldn’t be more apt to describe the future outlook for small-business owners.

Due to a strong first quarter performance, many small-business owners are predicting weakening economic conditions, according to this Reuters release.

“It’s hard to beat the first-quarter performance, so a ‘slowdown’ is definitely going to happen,” William Dunkelberg, National Federation of Independent Business’s (NFIB) chief economist, said in a statement. “The only question is how far and how fast.”

In addition to having a, um, unique last name, this Dunkelberg fella also has some odd views as to why small-business owners are feeling so blue. The decline, according to the NFIB economist, arrives on the heels of a reduction in job openings and capital spending plans, and an increase in the number of small-business owners who believe business conditions will be worse in six months. All this and Dunkelberg still has the cojones to say “so overall the economy is still looking fairly good.”

Um, OK.

Anyhow, according to the Reuters report, fifty-six percent of small-business owners hired or tried to hire one or more workers in May. However, of that total 84 percent, owners reported few or no qualified applicants for the positions they were trying to fill. Inventories are also lean, having been drawn down by strong sales in the first quarter, “a deficiency that owners plan to cure in the second quarter,” the NFIB said.

Great. So now we have a small army of unqualified workers scrambling to fill demand. Or do we?

Another report, this time from Manufactuer’s News Inc. (MNI), found that manufacturers in the Maryland/DC area figured out how to increase output with technology and outsourcing as opposed to hiring “unqualified” applicants.

Some other MNI factoids to get out of the way before we proceed:

• Maryland/DC accounts for seven percent of the Mid-Atlantic’s industrial jobs and 8.5 percent of the region’s manufacturing plants.

• Baltimore remains Maryland’s top industrial leader with 1,017 companies listed in the 2007 edition. Baltimore accounts for 41,996 jobs or 21 percent of the state’s industrial employment. Washington D.C. is home to 300 manufacturers and 19,312 jobs.

• Maryland’s top three industrial sectors are printing and publishing, industrial machinery and equipment, and metal fabricating. These sectors account for 2,188 companies or 39 percent of Maryland’s manufacturers.

The region is clearly a hotbed of manufacturing activity. Alas, Maryland/DC has miraculously lost 4,294 jobs since May of 2006. How will these active regions in the U.S. retain and even grow jobs when technology and outsourcing seems to be the special everyone is ordering on the unemployment menu?

Well, it seems as though the IT spending machine in the small-business realm is running on empty, if you’re to believe this bit of news from AMR Research, based on a survey of 600 IT managers. Try this on for size:

IT spending growth among SMB customers will probably average somewhere between 2 percent and 3 percent in 2006. This is a lot lower than the 6 to 8 percent IT spending growth that SMBs racked up in 2005. The report says that smaller firms, like their larger brethren in the commercial world, are being hit with demands to reduce IT costs, deliver productivity gains, and to outsource some of their IT operations to third parties.

Is the small business market going to march down the path of automation, thus reducing manual jobs? Or has IT spending cooled enough to allow some forms to open up their purse-strings and hire a few good men and women?