Page 11 - Business Plans that Work A Guide for Small Business

2 • Business Plans that Work

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companies were launched during a recession or a bear market. In 5–10 years,
we will see many new companies on the Inc. 500 and the Fortune 500
that were founded during the “Great Recession.” If America has learned
anything during the Great Recession of 2008–10, it is that job security is a
myth. To succeed, people need to be creative in their career design, which
means focusing their career on positions that intersect with market trends,
taking jobs with interesting young companies, and developing skill sets that
help them understand how to synthesize inputs. For those of you reading
this book, the time might be now. You are not alone in your entrepreneurial
dreams. Over 26 million fellow Americans are in the process of launching
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a business or own a new business less than four years old. Ultimately, the
most rewarding and satisfying careers are those that are created for oneself;
create a company rather than take a job. With the current pace of inno-
vation this probably means preparing for jobs that might not exist today.
Entrepreneurs’ unique experiences imbue them with an ability to combine
human, physical, and financial resources to create advantage.
Babson College, along with the London Business School, spearheaded
the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) project in 1999. Today,
GEM tracks the rate of entrepreneurship across 54 countries. In the GEM
study, entrepreneurship is defined as any attempt to create a new business.
Best estimates of the entrepreneurial activity rate for adults aged 18 to
74 in 1993 was around 4 percent. After peaking at around 16.7 percent
during the Internet boom in 2000, the rate dropped to 8.7 percent in
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2008, still over twice the level of activity since 1993. However, not every
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entrepreneur succeeds in launching a business, and only 40 percent of
launched businesses survive longer than five years. This book is designed
to help you get beyond the prelaunch stage, successfully navigate the new
business stage, and ultimately grow your business into a sustainable en-
terprise that is both personally and financially rewarding.

1 D. Stangler, The Economic Future Just Happened, Kansas City: Ewing Marion
Kauffman Foundation, 2009.
2 A. Ali, E. Allen, C. Brush, W. Bygrave, J. De Castro, J. Lange, H. Neck, J. Onochie,
I. Phinisee, E. Rogoff, and A. Suhu, What Entrepreneurs Are Up To: Global
Entrepreneurship Monitor 2008 National Entrepreneurial Assessment for the United
States of America, Wellesley, MA: Global Entrepreneurship Research Association,
2009.
3 For those of you interested in learning more about the GEM project and reading past
reports, please see www.gemconsortium.org/default.asp.
4 A business launch is defined as the point in time when a firm starts generating
revenue.