What’s Good for Entrepreneurs is Good for All of Us

180 View (written by Esther Friedberg Karp) - Many baby boomers grew up remembering the phrase “What’s good for General Motors is good for the country.” Whether that was a misquoting of GM’s then-president Charlie Wilson or not was irrelevant: it was the feeling of the time in the post-World War II era.

That was so then. Times have changed and so have the fortunes of General Motors and other big-name manufacturers who were our economic rocks. Now their world is being “rocked,” and not in a good way.

It is such a different world that my maternal grandparents, for instance, who passed away in the 1980’s, would not recognize it at all.

The Institute for the Future, a Palo Alto-based think tank, and software maker Intuit, Inc., based in Mountain View, have commissioned a three-part study regarding the trends of the future, and to date the first two parts have been published and are available at http://www.intuit.com/futureofsmallbusiness.

Part One analyzes entrepreneurs, what demographic groups comprise this tidal wave of business owners, and what economic events are contributing to the explosive growth of entrepreneurship.

Part Two covers social and technological advances, which are contributing to the fact that small business is the future in this country, regardless of which country you happen to be in when you are reading this. In short, the 1960’s through the 1970’s brought social change. The 1980’s through to 2000 and beyond saw technological change. Cumulatively, they have set the stage for the economic transformation in this millennium that is screaming “small business.”

Part Three of the study, expected to be released by the end of 2007, will cover how small businesses will affect society and the economy in 2017.

Whether they are measured by sheer numbers of businesses, numbers of people involved, or the dollars that they generate, small business is where it’s at now and where it’ll be in the future for the vast majority of us and our descendants.

Barriers to entry into business have been greatly diminished or altogether eliminated by dramatically lowered costs, better systems and tools, and better ease of operation of these tools. It is now quite reasonable that a small business would have systems in place that are equal to or better than those of much larger enterprises. Small companies can play with the “big boys (and girls)” on an equal footing because they have access to cost-effective, super-efficient, and easy-to-learn options for communications, information, customer relations, promotion, financial management, and outsourced goods and labour.

Keep your eye on the Institute for the Future’s third installment. New businesses based on someone else’s revolutionary business idea are quite successful, including “mash-ups,” which combine information from several sources to create a new business. One such enterprise is HousingMaps, which brings together craigslist and Google Maps to create a new real estate business. The opportunities for creating new businesses on a shoestring are endless; the opportunities for servicing them with their outsourced needs are likewise endless. This is where the money is.