This morning I got an email from the Kauffman Foundation, sometimes called the world’s largest foundation devoted to entrepreneurship. In part, it said this:
“During the Great Recession, more Americans have become entrepreneurs than at any time in the past 15 years. However, while (today) the economy and its high unemployment rates may have pressed more individuals into business ownership, most of them are going it alone, rather than starting companies that employ others.
According to the “Kauffman Index of Entrepreneurial Activity,” a leading indicator of new business creation in the United States, 0.34 percent of American adults created a business per month in 2010, a rate that…represents the highest level of entrepreneurship over the past decade and a half. In contrast, however, the quarterly employer firm rate has dropped from 0.13 percent in 2007 to 0.10 percent in 2010″.
They’re saying 2010 had the highest rate of people starting thier own businesses, but these businesses are not creating jobs.
Is this a bad thing?
The level of technology available to big business today allows these companies to hire less people, so as to keep their “bottom line” healthy, while at the same time feeding our ridiculously high unemployment rate. It’s refreshing to know that that same technology has lowered the “barriers to entry”, and makes it possible for individuals to make their own living using their own talents through entrepreneurship, while keeping everything lean and mean.
Over the weekend I was looking over the book “Poke the Box” by Seth Godin (sorry, no affiliate link – go look it up on Amazon). A quote that resonates with me from the book is “Stop the tyranny of the Picked. Pick yourself”. I say that (well, not that exactly, but…) to the “kitchen table” businesses, the Micro-Entrepreneurs I work with everyday – that they don’t need someone to give them permission to make a living. With the right tools, they can give themselves permission.
Maybe we are all heading to a “Tipping Point” where people are realizing the possibilities, the freedoms of being self employed. That soon it will be like before the industrial age and everybody just figured out what to do to put food at the table, and we can stop the practice of having public schools prepare our children to “get a job”, to settle for working for someone else.
Imagine – lots of little businesses who can make a living for themselves by selling locally, while putting food on the table, and becoming profitable sooner, so that maybe they can hire a person or two (those that still think working for someone else is the only way to go). The fear of being fired swept away by the joy of figuring it out, making your own way doing something you love.
It’s radical. It’s scary.
I kinda like the idea.
I got an email the other day telling me that American Express Open and Facebook are “teaming up to help Small Business”! They are having a contest and are offering as first prize a Facebook Makeover and $20,000 to “take your business to the next level”.
