Mike
Carruthers:
Becoming an entrepreneur may sound appealing but there is a down side.
Scott A Shane:
Most entrepreneurs fail. Actually, the typical
entrepreneur ends up with a failed business. If you go out five years, you're
already into more than half of the start-ups fail. Scott
Shane, author of the book The
Illusions of Entrepreneurship… Most
entrepreneurs make relatively little money with the businesses that they start.
In fact only about ten percent of entrepreneurs make more money than they would
have made had they stayed in their previous job. Although
you often hear about high-tech entrepreneurs becoming very successful, they are
not typical. The
typical business is somebody starting a retail business or personal service kind
of business usually with about twenty-five thousand dollars of their own money.
Their aspirations are to have a business in say about five years that has about
a $100,000 in revenue - that's the typical start-up in America. And
Scott says many entrepreneurs make a fundamental mistake. Most
people start businesses to pursue the same customers with the same product as
their previous employers, even though we have a lot of data that shows that the
successful entrepreneurs are the ones who go after customers that their previous
employers missed. And so this "me-to ism" is one of those things that
leads to a poor strategy for a start-up. Tomorrow,
exploding more of the myths of entrepreneurship - I'm Mike Carruthers and that's
Something You Should Know. | 
