This past week’s StartupNation Radio show focused on home-based businesses. We covered a lot of the pros and cons of starting and operating a business at home, and interviewed several successful entrepreneurs who all started in their homes and have gone on to great success. Most illuminating for me however was the realization that in the absence of being able to start a business at home, many businesses would never have been started at all in the U.S. And think what that would mean to our economy.
To put it in perspective, over the last decade, 24 million new businesses were started in the U.S. as home-based businesses. That’s one new home-based business starting every 11 seconds. Significantly, home-based businesses account for roughly 52% of all businesses in the U.S. and generate a whopping $427 billion per year in collective revenue. By any measure, that’s big business. To bottom line it… no doubt, without the existence of this segment of the business community in the U.S., we wouldn’t have the powerhouse economy that we do, and I’m not sure our great country would be able to maintain the moniker of “the land of opportunity” without the ability to start a business at home.
I asked Jay Kriner, founder of the home-based business known as BevBuckle (www.TheBeerBuckle.com) if he would ever have been able to start his business if not for at home, and he answered with an emphatic “no”. Think about that. Think about what that means not only to the facilitation of one’s own dreams of owning a business but also to our economy at large. So the next time you think home-based businesses are nothing more than a hobby or nothing more than something to do to pass the time and stay busy, think again. Check out our show and there will be no doubt of the power and importance of fostering our community of home-based business entrepreneurs and encouraging the startup of more.
