The future of small-business start-ups
What does the future hold for entrepreneurs? Here's an interesting thought from an E-mail chat I had with entrepreneur and futurist Thomas Frey of the Da Vinci Institute, a business and technology think tank.
U.S. News: What is changing and what do start-up businesses have to watch out for in the future?
Frey: I often talk about what I call the "confluence of influence." This has to do with the do-it-yourself-content movement, where bloggers, podcasters, and others have been given a voice. The single points of influence from the past have changed, and now several million people will have a voice in what's going on. The trick is to find the people who can influence your particular industry and figure out how to get them to say something nice about you.
Because of the millions of voices now speaking at once, there is a lot of noise in the business world, and it takes a lot to rise above the noise. But in addition, the pace of business is speeding up. Someone just turned the metronome on high. Millions of voices mean millions of opinions, and those opinions can either work for you or work against you. And if a large segment of the online world connects with what you're trying to do, that can either be a tremendous blessing or a tremendous curse, but in either case you will have little time to react.
U.S. News: Are we going to see more people dropping out of the corporate world?
Frey: The short answer is yes. Many of them will be seasoned professionals looking for meaning in their lives.
Entrepreneurship is oftentimes a brutal environment to exist in, but it also has many appealing qualities that make it a real magnet for people who find themselves in one of those life-changing situations. Many will choose to do consulting or contract work to bring in money. Others will buy a franchise or start a business that they hope to grow in time. But a rare few are now developing a business I call the "empire of one."
An empire of one business is a one-person business with far-reaching influence. Typically, the business outsources everything—products manufactured in China or India, sent to a distribution center in the United States, with customers in the United Kingdom and Brazil. Manufacturing, marketing, bookkeeping, accounting, legal, and operations are all outsourced to other businesses around the world.
The empire-of-one business model is one with great appeal to former corporate executives with global contacts and good ability to manage things remotely. We will see a sharp increase in these types of businesses starting in 2006.
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