Unemployed? Start a business.
1st Oct 2008
The latest unemployment figures (5.5% - September 2008) have yet again shown an increase with more fallout from the credit crunch and the tightening of consumer spend. Not a good time to start a business you may think, but thousands of aspiring entrepreneurs would disagree.
These are people who through no fault of their own, suddenly find themselves out of work. They have inadvertently had one of the biggest obstacles to starting a business removed, the risk of losing the regular paycheck.
Starting a business or working for yourself does have risks, but when you haven’t a job anyway, those risks are outweighed by all the positive factors. There is an attraction of finally being in charge of your own fate and not subject to company politics.
There is still the question of what type of business to start-up and having the drive and willpower to get it going. A recent survey on Company Partners (www.companypartners.com) of people that had expressed interest in starting their own business, suggested the answer to some of this. Of those that had said that they would like to start their own business, the ones that actually did it were more likely to have successfully done so with the help of a business partner.
Clearly there are benefits of working with a partner who has complementary skills to yourself, whether it be technical, sales or simply one person being strategic and the other having attention to detail.
However the biggest reported benefit is the ability to bounce ideas about and to drive one another forward. At a time when confidence may be under threat, having a colleague to discuss plans with and motivate each other is invaluable.
It is this mutual encouragement that makes the difference between starting a business, or daydreaming about it for a while before once again opening the jobs page.
