You can ask any SCORE or ACE small business counselor for advice of whether or not you should start a business.
Generally, they will try to talk you out of it, and play devil's advocate.
But why do they do this you ask? Shouldn't they give you positive feedback and inspiration? Shouldn't they be optimistic rather than pessimistic? Well, I've done a little consulting on the side myself, and I've also run a franchising company.
The reality is that most businesses fail, and if you were to take a purely mathematical probability to this equation, it would be best not to start a business at all.
Still, we are a nation which prides ourselves on innovation and entrepreneurship.
We know we need a constant stream of new ideas to help keep industry healthy, and our employment base strong.
Some say too much entrepreneurship is unhealthy for an economy because there is too much disruption in industry, meaning that industry is less likely to invest heavily in their infrastructure and long-term capitalization.
While some of that may be true, we are much better with more entrepreneurship than less especially at the small business level.
Since 75% of the businesses that are created will no longer be in business in five years, and since entrepreneurship is so difficult in our country because things are so competitive, one has to wonder why our government makes it even tougher at every turn.
Why does the government at all levels create so many rules and regulations which impede entrepreneurship? Not long ago, I was at Starbucks talking with a financial advisor about this.
He's been in business for over 40 years.
He'd watched wealth come and go with various individuals running their own companies, and he'd watched several startups in his area grow into huge business concerns.
We got to talking about the onerous regulations of people that run businesses out of their homes, and how much of the city and municipal business licenses were more of a tax than anything else.
In many regards this inhibits small business startups from the get-go.
It makes things tough on those who are perhaps building a prototype in their garage, some new invention, or even those creating a business plan, wondering if they should start or not.
Maybe they want to get a few customers before they actually open the business, but then they are immediately in violation.
We shouldn't be doing this to our small business entrepreneurs, it's just wrong.
Further, Dell Computers was started out of the garage, so was Apple, and even Bill Gates started out small.
HP was a very small little business when it first started, and so was Disney.
Are we so sure we want to prevent grassroots entrepreneurship in our country in this way? It's hard enough starting a business and making it work, we don't need our government making it any tougher.
Please consider all this and think on it.