For many women re-entering the workforce, starting a home based business or a small-scale business is a favored option. Though myths and stories are many around starting a new business and most importantly sustaining it, a question here to ponder at – is business a satisfying career?
Business week has a great retarget of articles on business startup topics at www.businessweek.com/go/07/gettingstarted. On this website, I enjoyed reading Stacy Perman’s article where she says “Launching any venture means confronting the possibility of failure.” According to this article, In 2005 some 671,800 new small businesses were launched, according to the Small Business Administration. Now the bad news: About 544,800 of them closed not long after, felled by any number of issues such as capitalization and market forces.
However, there’s no standard method of measuring startups and failures, and a 2005 Monthly Labor Report gives a considerably more optimistic picture: 66% of new businesses survive the first two years, and 44% the first four years.
The debate on whether starting a new venture will be viable or sustain the market is something to be taken up upfront during your decision phase on launching your new career as an entrepreneur. But don’t let the many questions and complexity of starting a small scale or home based business daunt you, the feeling and the satisfaction of having done what you had dreamt of for long is much greater than having not done it at all. But we all want to be successful in our lives, and a lot depends on your vision and expectations of the business you launch to finally term it as a success or failure eventually.
Two famous quotes that might get you on the right track:
“Begin with the end in mind.”
“You plan to fail if you fail to plan.”
No matter what direction our career takes, you would be wondering always as well as evaluating as you go on — is this a satisfying profession? No one but you and only you will be able to answer this question, and I agree with Paula A. Sneed, a former executive vice president at Kraft Foods, who spoke with Kellogg School students at an event and presented five rules that she believes can help people capitalize on change and realize their goals:
  1. Keep a big, preposterous, ridiculous dream in your life
  2. Have a strategic plan for your professional and personal life
  3. Be a reality shaker
  4. Keep only the right people in your life
  5. Have the highest ethical character
In the end it is very important to draft a plan for your business to be profitable or satisfying in a sense you want it to – sustainability of a project is always in question when you put in lot of effort and the return is not as conducive. Keep that in mind too!