Their ventures are not the growth companies Inc. ordinarily lionizes. They are anything but job geysers. In fact, when these founders set out for the entrepreneurial front, they take no full-time salaried bodies along for the ride, and they rarely expect at the end of it to hold an appreciable asset to sell. Should a full-fledged company evolve out of the flight of a soloist, well, so be it. But the perpetrator could hardly be charged with company building in the first degree.
Yet soloists are, most certainly, starting and running businesses -- about 400,000 new ones in the first three quarters of 1993 alone -- in ways that promise profound consequences for the economy. Already they are changing workplaces and challenging the way we think about business building. They are, perhaps, restoring business formation to its roots. Recall that fewer than 100 years ago, most Americans worked for themselves. Thomas Jefferson envisioned a nation of independent merchants and farmers. Today's soloists are their heirs.
For the foreseeable future, given the relentless pace of corporate downsizing, the supply of, as well as the demand for, such free agents should only increase. As companies large and small continue to atomize their operations and contract out more functions -- in pursuit of more "virtual" structures (and more real profits) -- the opportunities for solo fliers will abound. So, too, will the exigencies of knowing how to navigate such a journey. With nearly half of all workers witnessing layoffs in their own workplaces, and at least one in five worried about losing his or her job, there are few who should ignore the flight plans of the soloists. We all may find, sooner or later, to our shock or delight, that Lily Tomlin is right: "We are all in this alone."
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Who They Are
Neither employees nor employers, they're not exactly sure what to call themselves. Some answer to sole proprietor. But others tag "Inc." onto their names. Some call themselves consultants. Others, contractors. Still others, free agents. The truly hip claim to be virtual employees or, even cooler, virtual-business owners. The electronically savvy, especially in Europe, profess to "telework." The terms lone wolf, lone ranger, and lone eagle have all been pressed into service. It's a battle of neologisms.
In this instance, all the phrase making swirls around a legion of individualists who are blurring the lines between job holding and business building. They are corporate mutineers, refugees, asylum seekers. They are people like Ellen Leanse, a 35-year-old mother of two young children, who left her executive position at Apple Computer because she couldn't imagine raising her kids while working 80-hour weeks. Not unlike Leanse, Jane King, a veteran of several large financial companies, struck out on her own after the birth of her daughter. (Commuting from Boston to New York City and bringing her breast pump to meetings had become a case study in absurdity.) Jody Severson, a 45-year-old political consultant, left the small advertising agency he had cofounded to unshackle himself from employees, paperwork, and the burden of having to manage anyone else at all. "I got tired of spending every Sunday night sweating payroll. That loses its charm after a while." Bill Collier of Wappingers Falls, N.Y., is now starting a company called Multiprocessor Diagnostics under more- acute conditions: after losing his job of 33 years at IBM, the 58-year-old programmer reckons going solo is his best and perhaps only employment option. (See "The Fear of Falling," page 7.)
Doing What They Do Best
While the circumstances compelling them might vary -- from having kids to burning out to getting pink-slipped or pushed out to pasture -- the soloists share a similar karma. What can Leanse's bicameral business -- selling beaded jewelry part of the time and providing high-tech marketing expertise the rest of the time -- possibly have in common with Severson's political consultancy or Collier's software business or King's financial-services firm?
For starters, a striking unanimity of purpose: all want to practice their craft. And, secondly, they're all building on the same reliable cornerstone: proven expertise. Variegated as their ventures may be, the soloists are adamant about doing one thing, which is what they do best. Whatever it is they've been doing for years, the thing someone used to pay them for -- which they presumably loved to do and over time had become more than passably good at -- that's what they transform into a business. But without anyone else to cotton to or provide for: no meetings, no managers, no withholding tax due.
"I decided one day about eight years ago I was going to do only what I really liked to do," reports Jody Severson, the political consultant in South Dakota, "which was not managing a bunch of people." He had come to that insight the hard way: at the ad agency he owned at the time.
His years running that business had cured him of any impulse to build another company. "As soon as you start a company, you've got higher overhead, you've got at least a 40-hour week, and you've lost the luxury of choosing the work you want to do. Running a company is just a race to keep the cash coming in, to cover that payroll. There's no freedom in that.
