About Face
Here to Serve
Few of these future lifestyle entrepreneurs will start companies
in manufacturing or even retail, sectors of the small-business
community that are in precipitous decline. Manufacturing alone has
lost nearly 3 million jobs over the past five years, and small
manufacturers have been particularly hard hit, as they have been
unable to compete with low wages overseas. According to a 2000
study by the SBA, by 2010, "the relative shares of employment
in the manufacturing and service sectors are expected to be just
about opposite of the 1950 levels"; and by 2015, roughly 35
percent of American businesses will be in services. The most recent
survey from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, a research
program-funded by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and
conducted by Babson College-that assesses the national level of
entrepreneurship, says that over the next five years, the most
highly educated entrepreneurs, who more often start IT or service
businesses, will have the most employees. As entrepreneurs of the future increasingly move into
higher-value service businesses, they will also have to attain
higher levels of education and interact more with foreign suppliers
and customers to succeed. Howard Aldrich, a professor of sociology
at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, who has studied
entrepreneurship, says that today, education is the key predictor
of business formation-people with more education are more likely to
start a business. What's more, for a service business to
compete in an increasingly global marketplace, future
entrepreneurs-in IT, biotechnology, customer service, consulting
and other fields-will have to outsource, sell and purchase abroad.
The Department of Commerce estimates the number of small companies
that export tripled between 1987 and 1997, and small-business
experts expect the trend to continue. Looking to the Future Though the entrepreneur of the future may
be more racially diverse, older, devoted to personal and family
time, more globally focused, better-educated and more concentrated
on services, he or she will still need some core traits to succeed.
Alex De Noble, a professor of entrepreneurship at San Diego State
University, says, "You need to have certain principles of
personality" to succeed in small business at any time. Content Continues Below
Indeed, by studying entrepreneurs in a range of locales, De
Noble and several colleagues have concluded that successful
entrepreneurship requires a certain amount of neuroticism,
extro-version, conscientiousness, agreeableness and openness.
Neuroticism, De Noble says, leads entrepreneurs to focus on
details, while conscientiousness helps them plan. Agreeableness
allows them to build external networks crucial for a new company to
prosper, extroversion facilitates this network-building, and
openness to new ideas is crucial for taking the leap into business
ventures. Indeed, De Noble says, 10 or 20 years from now, we will
still recognize the characteristics of successful entrepreneurs:
Despite the changes in the external business environment,
"running a business is still running a business." | Seeing Green | Trisha Anderson was a pioneer. In 1999, in her late 40s, she
decided she'd had enough of the corporate life and wanted to
try entrepreneurship-in an area that fit her lifestyle. "The
life I was living, swept up in the rat race, was making me
sick-physically and spiritually," Anderson notes. So she
founded mybackyard.com, a Web site that provides information on
organic foods, eco-friendly gardening and other environmental
topics and also sells products related to these topics. There was only one drawback: "There weren't older
entrepreneurs around, and I felt very different," Anderson
says. Regardless, she got her company off the ground, advertising
it through link exchanges and word-of-mouth. By 2003, her homebased
mybackyard.com had roughly 50,000 unique visitors each month, and
Anderson had two employees working for her. Even better, as the number of older entrepreneurs in America has
skyrocketed, Anderson no longer feels so alone. "In the
current economic environment, many ex-employees start
companies," she says. Anderson credits the trade group Forum
for Women Entrepreneurs (FWE) for putting her in contact with other
people in her situation. "The FWE seemed to be
age-blind," she says. Today, Anderson has few regrets about her decision. "I have
never wanted to go back to my old job," she says. "I
didn't anticipate how totally life-consuming [entrepreneurship]
would be, or how much stuff you have to do yourself when you start
a business. But it has given me the confidence I need." Anderson has been an inspiration to other older entrepreneurs as
well: "My husband and his colleague are about to launch [their
own] product." |
Joshua Kurlantzick is a writer in Washington DC.
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Brewing Big (With a Micro Soul)After 18 years of growth and with annual revenue about to break $100 million, Kim Jordan still maintains New Belgium's freewheeling spirit.
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