This one is for our beloved fellow entrepreneurs, which give-or-take represent 400m workers or about 5% of the world population. With the opening era of entrepreneurialism, running a business becomes a trendy feature of our time and age. In the US only, 25m individuals are estimated to be starting or running a business. If you aggregate the gig-economy workers, and frankly we can’t think why you should not, then entrepreneurs represent a wholesome 60m, an astounding 37% of the labour force.
Let’s first debunk a common myth, an entrepreneur is not necessarily a VC-seeded tech startup-er working on the next unicorn from his garage. Whether entrepreneurs are running a lifestyle business, digging in for a potential digital fortune, or simply facing no other choice than setting it up all alone, they all have common character traits. At the grass root this is a shrewd cocktail of personal drive, risk-taking, and marathonian resilience.
What do they need? It starts with some help with the intricate cogs of running a business: simple and affordable solutions to manage at scale pay, invoicing, marketing, sales, office space, compliance, and all other lovely admin tasks. Then, they desperately need to emerge: publicity, referral, networking would make their task tremendously easier. Sometimes, they would need money but not all businesses are capital-hungry, not all businesses want to scale, and not all entrepreneurs are necessarily ready to deal with the burden of investors.
It is time we help them a bit. But why? First, even a cynic would consider this a great investment opportunity, everybody and her sister is turning, willingly or not, into an entrepreneur. The total addressable market grows in a sense. Secondly, they are essential to the transmission mechanism of economic wealth and social felicity. Very small or very large, they are all active and willing ingredients of a nation’s progress.
For our own sake, we need to complete efficiently the transition from large-corporates-rule-the-world and you-work-a-lifetime-for-one, to we-all-are-entrepreneurs. This would give us a better chance at solving diversity issues, wealth gaps, and inequalities of all sorts in our developed systems. Because, those great causes are void without a careful attention to the details of their implementation, of micro and not macro considerations.
A new dawn has arrived and next morning, say to yourself in the mirror: I am an entrepreneur.
360 Advisory – Markets