Category Archives: Micro-Business

Jim Fletcher left a comment for me yesterday that really hit home. He totally captured my mood of thirty years ago! I am practically on record as having expressed all of these viewpoints: I know the cliche "do what you … Continue reading →

If you choose to work for yourself, you are joining a rapidly growing trend. I can easily see the day coming when a new graduate chooses a career as a salaried employee only because he or she hasn’t got the necessary confidence and skill to start their own business.

"So you got a job at Bank of America?"

"Yeah. I couldn’t face the thought of starting my own company and not making a go of it."

"Too bad! Maybe in a few years, you’ll be ready to take that step."

Working for yourself is no longer a last resort. There are many highly trained people who have deliberately chosen to leave the corporate world to strike out on their own. Building a business from scratch is the ultimate challenge for many. You get all of the excitement and all of the responsibility.

For many, the risk of failure in a micro-business is insignificant compared to the slow torture of trying to accomplish anything significant in a highly layered corporate structure.

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We hear about small businesses being critical to the health of our economy, but it seems that the real action may well be taking place in the Micro-Business sector.  Since I am right up to my eyeballs in at least one micro-business, I am going to devote a few posts to this interesting phenomena.

A micro-business is one which does less than $1 million in business per year. The majority of these business are home-based businesses (HBBs)and they make up an unknown percentage of the small businesses that are tracked by the Small Business Administration.

I have not been able to find recent micro-business figures for the entire US yet, but in the pre-internet days of 1992, home-based business contributed $314 Billion dollars, or 11 percent to the economy.

With today’s internet tools and online payment systems like PayPal, a micro-business can do business as easily as any large corporation. I wonder if the micro-business sector might not be contributing as much as 18% of the economy this year?

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