This is for everyone who chose freedom and started a business. It is for the American entrepreneurs who built something of their own. I am one of them.

A couple writing in Entrepreneur looked at three possible businesses and chose a cleaning franchise because they wanted time freedom and financial independence. One of them, Enrique, was finishing an MBA and turned that future into his final project. What they took from the season is simple enough to keep: freedom asks for structure, and the structure is the people around you. A strong entrepreneurial community is a set of intentional connections, with challenge and support in the same circle. Success, in their telling, is an integrated life. Freedom arrives when you meet the hard parts with the right people beside you.

Some people left good jobs while they still had them. The BBC profiled Ryan Wertman, who had a corporate law job and walked away to open a one-person practice serving other small businesses. Moving up the ranks had stopped looking like the prize, and the years after 2007 had shown him that a big company was not the most stable place to put a career. Michael Pazyniak, after more than a decade planning corporate events, started Lighthouse Creative Works when he saw that his career was safer in his own hands. The piece says entrepreneurship can work like a safety net, and Wertman names the appeal in plain language: lifestyle and freedom, including the freedom to go for a run.

SUCCESS describes a wider version of the same choice and calls it the YouEconomy: people taking the future of work into their own hands, sharing tools, taking gigs, and starting freelance businesses. A Harris Poll it commissioned, run in May among more than 2,000 U.S. adults, found that one-third had earned income that way in the prior twelve months. For 71 percent of the adults working in that economy, the earnings were a supplement. The magazine also describes nearly 30 million Americans adding income beside a main job. The line it puts under those numbers is the one I want on the wall: control of who you work with, what you work on, and your own life. Freelance and contract work can be the start. A storefront and an LLC can wait. In a companion piece, SUCCESS notes that Baird started BabyNameWizard.com within ten days of a layoff from iVillage, and later sold it. Tameka Collins, after losing a public-relations job, combined contract work, tutoring, and driving, and the magazine says she came to earn almost 150 percent of her old salary while keeping time for her daughter’s school.

The Cut is frank about the weight of the choice. It separates necessity entrepreneurs, who often lack other options, from opportunity entrepreneurs, and it says the research it has seen suggests necessity entrepreneurs are not always as successful or as happy. It reports an Intuit estimate from October 2010 that more than 40 percent of the American workforce would be contingent workers by 2020, and a Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation finding that people ages 55 to 64 make up 23.4 percent of new entrepreneurs. In the figures it cites, 63 percent of Americans chose self-employment, as did 48 percent of Britons and 49 percent of Germans. It also says the people most apt to work for themselves are the ones who already have some security. Saying that out loud is part of supporting people.

Helen Elizabeth Evans left corporate work in 1996 and later founded Hands On Business to help other entrepreneurs launch, change, and adapt. HuffPost tells how self-employment let her set her workload, put family and rest on the calendar, choose her collaborators, and do work that carries a purpose. The Archbridge Institute, with the American Business History Center, published twenty-one portraits of American Originals: men and women, Black and white, immigrants and native-born, people who met setbacks and still built.

Another founder, writing in Entrepreneur, left a corporate career and kept starting again. The counsel there is to trust your own compass, treat a failure as data for the next move, and let growth come from exploring. That writer’s car apps later passed a million downloads combined, and a later Amazon business went from zero to six figures.

Roger Staubach told SUCCESS that owning your business puts you in control of your financial destiny. Ted Turner told them that people who own their businesses are their own bosses and independent thinkers. Kathy Ireland’s company, in that same piece, began at her kitchen table with a few borrowed dollars. Jonathan Davis and Ellen Pfeiffer started after their jobs ended, and they built companies that served a need they could see. The liberty in those stories is creative freedom and financial independence, for you and for your family. Successful entrepreneurs in that piece call a chance taken on yourself the safer bet.

The New Republic notes that the entrepreneur is often pictured as a small-business owner, a David to the Goliath of corporate conformity. Erik Baker writes that the public image is also split between the tech billionaire and the gig worker using that billionaire’s app. This page is for the person inside a real choice: the one who started, and the one who is about to. The door is open. Keep building. There is room beside you.

Sources

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