Profiles of entrepreneurs who are creating their own jobs and changing the face of business.
They're leaving large corporations (and small ones) by the thousands. Sometimes by choice. Sometimes not. They know what they like (autonomy, control, good quality of life) and what they don't (meeting payrolls, managing people, inflexible schedules). They're creating their own jobs -- and changing the face of business
Contingent workers, consultants, contractors -- however one labels them, they are elegized as casualties of the new economy. Pitied as exploited day laborers. Bemoaned as sad artifacts of the temping of America. Big labor, big business, and big government would have us believe that when the economy rebounds (you know, really) and all those jobs rise from the dead (you know, really, really), these free agents won't blink before beaching themselves on a payroll again somewhere. Isn't that, after all, where they belong?
Only if you haven't been listening to them. Or counting them. Or taking a very close look at what they're doing and why.
Certainly, more than a few in this cohort of rugged individualists would fare better in full-time employment -- if they could get it. But, to be clear, we are not talking about the legion of angry young temps here. Or their even angrier counterparts, the reluctantly retired. We are not talking about workers who want to be employees, or employees camouflaged as contractors, or laborers in the underground economy, though those are undeniable and painful realities for many people today.
What we are talking about is a hybrid breed of business owners, whose enterprises provide room for only one paycheck: their own.
They are not pioneering new technologies or spawning the industries of tomorrow. They are not building empires, and they are not getting rich. But in many ways these solo operators are changing what it means to be in business by inventing new varieties of self-employment.
Professionals, many of them former managers, the soloists are building careers instead of equity. Call it business without the baggage: no employees, no capital, no equity, no overhead. Maybe part-time, maybe full-time. Maybe because they lost a job. Just as likely, because they got sick of one.
It would be wholly undramatic if there weren't so darn many of them. An estimated 20 million Americans now make their primary living as solo operators. Indeed, according to government labor statistics, in the first three quarters of 1993 one out of every five new jobs added to the economy had been created by people who put themselves to work. Job growth in the category of self-employment increased at twice the rate of overall job growth through most of 1993.
The proliferation of solo professionals has not escaped the attention of marketers. In 1992 one-person offices constituted a $7.5-billion segment of the computer-equipment and office-equipment markets. By 1996 the purchasing power of those one-person operations is expected to top $10 billion. According to market researchers, who report a brisk demand for data on these businesses, there's hardly a phone or fax or computer maker that isn't desperate to reach what promises to be one of the fastest-growing markets for such manufacturers. A plethora of electronic bulletin boards, on-line newsletters, networks, support groups, and professional associations now target an audience of soloists that swells by the day. (See "Advice for the Soloist," page 7.) Even the government admits the phenomenon: the Department of Labor has taken to funding projects to help the unemployed become not just reemployed but self-employed.
Is this a long-term turn toward self-employment or a temporary and predictable response to a recent recession? That's still anyone's guess. Indisputably, there are those who go solo as a stopgap: when the unemployment checks or the severance pay or the hopes of a new job run out. Yet a growing number of economists (and even more employers) no longer expect a flotilla of jobs to come ashore with the next high tide.
Talk to a few dozen practicing soloists and it becomes clear that a significant number of them do not regard their ventures as short-term rÉsumÉ fillers. Going solo for them is not the employment choice of last resort. Even among the throng who find themselves laid off, downsized, or reengineered out of corporations -- to the tune of 50,000 salaried or management personnel each month last year -- choosing self-employment can be as much an act of liberation as an act of desperation. These "lone eagles," as one research group calls them, are not so much throwaway workers as walk-away ones, tired of laboring in organizations -- in some cases even those they themselves own -- for stagnating wages or inflexible schedules or obsolete promises about job security.
"The so-called security of a regular paycheck is an illusion, anyway," reports Jody Severson of Rapid City, S. Dak., a one-man band and formerly an employer of 15. "Either you're answering what the market needs or you're not. If you're not, you're doomed, whether you're in an office at IBM or an office in your basement."
That logic is only partly Darwinian. Sure, soloists, like everyone else bent on surviving in the new economy, are thinking about their fallout shelters. And a business of one's own, ironically, looks safer all the time. But going solo also strikes a blow for personal and professional freedom.
Those who choose the solo path want a measure of control over their lives, a control that neither a regular job nor a company full of employees will allow. Their financial goals are rather modest: they hope to meet the mortgage payments, send the kids to college, save for retirement. They want, in short, what people a generation or two ago might have been guaranteed by working for a large corporation.
