Way back in the last century (1991) a survey was conducted by my research firm, MarketWave, Inc., of almost 7,000 people who were not, nor had ever been, business owners of any kind. The question was a simple one:
If all obstacles were removed, would you like
to own your own business?
In other words, if what ever was stopping you from starting a business didn’t exist, would you at least attempt it? Would you prefer to be an entrepreneur, or an employee?
Eighty five percent said Yes, they’d prefer to work for themselves. Which means 15 percent misunderstood the question on the survey. After all, if what ever concerned you enough to not attempt a business venture didn’t exist, then you’d have no fear of doing so.
I mean, who wouldn’t want to be in control of their own life? To have the freedom to make their own decisions, work their own hours, and write their own pay-check?
Even using the conservative 85 percent figure, that would mean about 200 million Americans want to start their own business, but have never even attempted it! We thought there must be some pretty compelling reasons why, so we set out to find out what they were.
To no one’s surprise, it was never about
preferring to work for someone else’s business,
but rather the incapacitating fear of starting
your own.
And it was the same four fears, every single time.
It takes too much money.
People didn’t have tens-of-thousands, or hundreds-of-thousands of dollars to invest in a business (and they didn’t know anyone else who did).
It takes too much time.
People didn’t want to work 80 hours a weeks for the first year or two to get their business going.
There’s too much risk.
Over 56 percent of all businesses fail in the first two years, and they’d have to quit their job, so there was no safety net.
They didn’t know how.
Most people had never taken any business courses. They had no business experience. They don’t know anything about taxes, accounting, marketing, and they myriad other skills a good entrepreneur must possess.
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