I came across an interesting “mental candy” article
recently from Inc. magazine which describes a survey conducted by Intuit. The
survey represented about 1,300 small business owners. In this case, a
small business was defined as having 20 or fewer employees.
Here are some of the facts that I found fun and somewhat interesting:
-
43 percent of the respondents
admitted they were “loners” as kids.
I’m not that surprised that such a large percentage of
entrepreneurs would label themselves as “loners”. Most of the
entrepreneurs I know would likely fall into this camp. What I found a wee
bit interesting was the phrasing of the sentence. 43% of us “admitted”
that we were loners (with the implication being that we’re admitting some
fault. Personally, I think being a loner or an introvert is simply an
attribute and neither good nor bad.
-
43 percent are the oldest in
their family.
I think the fact that this number matches the number in
point 1 is simply a co-incidence (though it would be interesting to see how
much overlap there was between the two – i.e. are 90% of the loners the
first-borns?).
-
77 percent do not have a
business degree.
Up until recently (June of last year), I would have fallen
into this camp too. I’m a bit surprised by just how many business
owners don’t have a business degree. But, I guess this might be
true in other areas as well. For example, how many software developers
have computer science (or related) degrees?
And, here’s a bonus item: 85 percent of small
business owners are sole proprietors (a legal designation that means the owner is the sole owner and directly liable for the business).
I find this particularly interesting. This means there are millions
of people out there that are by choice or by circumstance are exclusive owners of their companies. It would be interesting to know what the break-down was by industry
sector (but the raw data doesn’t seem to have been made available).
Here’s the full article from Inc.:
Not Only The
Loners Become Entrepreneurs