When people talk about starting something on their own, the initial reaction of their listeners is one of incredulity. The listeners immediately think they heard something wrong. It just sometimes does not appear right when people who had been working for someone else talks about putting up their own business. Secondly, the next question that is apt to be asked is: What about your college degree? Are you somehow throwing it away? These are gut reactions and totally understandable from a sane point of view. However, most entrepreneurs are not totally sane people when we define sanity by our usual standards of looking for a stable job and getting employed in a firm as a career. Yes, I must agree, a bit reluctantly perhaps, that entrepreneurs are a little bit crazy for walking away from a stable job and take the risk of finally being their own boss.
Being the boss has its own rewards, primarily a psychic one. For the first time ever, the person who went through the hassles of getting business permits and printing business cards and letterheads is about to start on a remarkable journey that can lead to either greatness or failure. It is also clear from the data that most small business owners have no desire to expand their business beyond a certain size. For them, they are content to attain a certain size (number of employees, branches or outlets) and just sort of coast along. However, there are also a small but significant proportion of them who dream of getting big someday and compete with those giant firms on an equal footing. They dream of hiring both professional management and sit on their own board of directors as chairman. These types of people had retained their hunger, drive and motivation despite the passage of the years. At any rate, their sole compensation goes beyond financial remuneration and they aspire for higher things such as providing employment to thousands of workers, introducing a technical innovation to the market, give some stiff competition to larger firms or fill some perceived need of society (selling a better mousetrap).
Entrepreneurship is certainly alive and well here in the United States. Record numbers of people are putting up new businesses each day and even the profile of entrepreneurs had changed a bit too. It is no longer that surprising that there are now more women entrepreneurs than ever before. The working moms who often have to juggle home and career find putting up their own businesses is a great way to combine the demands of home and earning an income to augment the family income. Additionally, we see today there are also a greater proportion of teenagers who are still in school putting up a firm of their own, usually in the high-tech industries such as computers or digital communications. Indeed, the entry to small business is never easier than before. In the U.S., it takes an average of only 4 days to register a business and $200 for all the permits and licenses needed to establish a legal entity. Compared to Japan, for example, where eleven different procedures for putting up a business costs around $3,500 and takes 31 days, the process to be followed in the U.S. is just a breeze indeed.
With the jobless recovery of the economy, many people are looking for other ways to earn some money and entrepreneurship is one avenue they can pursue with vigor. Besides the increasing number of women and youth entrepreneurs, there is another trend noted by the Small Business Administration. It is only in this period that the numbers of part-time entrepreneurs have increased five times from prior years and constitute one-third of all small businesses in the country. These small firms sometimes go beyond the normal two-year lifetime since start-up and are even moderately successful by most of any standard measure we can use. Others go on to become industry leaders by being extremely successful. It is estimated roughly fifty percent of all employment is generated by the small business outfits today. A small firm is defined as something that is independently owned and operated for profit and one easy way to go this route is the inflatable hire business. You should try it sometime to see how it works.
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