There's entrepreneurial fever abroad in the land. Seems like everyone wants to start their own business.
70% of high school students in a recent Gallup Poll said they wanted to own their own business.
According to a Yankelovich and Partners survey, 58% of employees think they won't be with their current employer in ten years. What will they be doing? 37% expect to have their own business by then.
According to various estimates, some 26-30 million people are "Free Agents" -- not aligned with a single employer. That's about one fifth of the workforce.
Folks have always wanted to work for themselves. Why the heavy interest right now?
A booming economy is one reason. The longer the boom goes on, the more it begins to appear that failure is impossible. This is dangerous. Failure is always possible.
Some years back, I was talking to Nolan Bushnell. Nolan invented pong and founded Atari. He hit it big. Then he left Atari and founded another company. It bombed. Big time. Nolan's comment: "It's bad to confuse good luck with good management."
A second reason is a decade or more of downsizing, right-sizing, re-engineering or whatever corporate euphemism you choose. Wipe the fancy rhetoric away and what we're talking about is people getting fired. Lots of them.
I knew a man who worked for a big oil company back in the seventies. He'd started when he dropped out of the eighth grade. That was in the twenties. He worked his way up to a responsible position. Then, when he was close to retirement, the company moved its headquarters from one city to another.
The company, Texaco, rewarded his loyalty. They gave him a choice. They'd move him to the new headquarters if he wanted to go there with the same job. If he didn't want to do that, they'd find work for him to finish out his fifty years in the town where he lived. Pay and benefits would stay the same. Try to imagine a company doing that today.
The Fortune 500 alone have cut more than 5 million jobs since 1980. When I was a boy, the idea was that you'd join a company and be loyal and they'd be loyal back. No more. There's nothing like watching someone you love get fired after years of hard work and dedication to make you question that loyalty strategy.
A third reason is that we're back in the part of the image cycle where entrepreneurs look good. Twenty years ago or so, the folks who worked for themselves were the odd ones. They "probably couldn't make it" in a big corporation. The tax code and credit rating system in this country still have this bias. It's far better from their viewpoint if you work for someone else.
That's gone. Gosh, there's Michael Dell, starting a business in his dorm room and taking it big time. And Bill Gates. And Steve Case. Wow!! This running your own business could be exciting and profitable and romantic, too. It's even getting chic to tell folks that you work out of your home!
The final reason for the boom is technology. Personal computers make it possible to run a business with a minimum of staff support. Portable computing, and email, and wireless phones and pagers mean you can work just about anywhere. The web makes it possible to have your marketing materials available all the time while saving money on printing and postage.
One truism about starting your own business, though, is that it always looks easier than it is. A whole passel of folks who've started businesses never would have done it if they'd known how hard they'd be working. As one friend of mine put it, "The thing I like about having my own business is that I only have to work half a day. I just need to decide if it's the first twelve hours or the second twelve hours."
Date Published: 15 December 1999
Reviewed: 2/15/03
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