that it is often easier to ask for forgiveness than permission.
Or you’ll design such an organization yourself—which is my approach, and one that is increasingly common in the American economy. Here in New York City, according to numbers that the comptroller’s office shared with me, there were 807,750 self-employed workers in 2006. That was about a fifth of the roughly 4 million nongovernmental jobs in the city at the time. Of the 773,000 jobs that Gotham added from 1981 to 2006, a stunning 491,000 were people working for themselves. That made self-employment the biggest source of job creation in the city during those generally fat years.
The same trend seems to be playing out across the country, though the numbers can be slippery, thanks to varying definitions of self-employment, people who hold multiple jobs, off-the-books work, and other factors. The Bureau of Labor Statistics says that the national self-employment rate—the proportion of total employment made up of the self-employed—has hovered between 7 and 9 percent since the 1970s, but according to the Census Bureau, the number of “non-employer businesses” (that is, one-person shops) rose from 15.4 million in 1997 to 21.7 million in 2007. The U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) reports that the country had 4.5 million businesses with fewer than four employees in 2005; the owners of these businesses have much in common with true solo workers. That’s a lot of people calling themselves boss—around 25 million in the 125-million-strong U.S. private workforce. And that was a few years ago.
More recent queries on whether people consider themselves “free agents” produce a slightly higher rate.
According to Kelly Services (the temp agency and staffing company), a full 26 percent of the workforce called themselves “free agents” in 2009, compared with 19 percent in 2006.
There are many reasons—good and bad—for this rise. Corporations focused on their core competencies outsource almost everything else these days, which creates space for small PR firms, conference planners, freelance report writers, and the like. Part of this is to avoid the payroll expenses of taxes and benefits, and part is because smaller firms and individuals can be more nimble. Contracting with them gives firms a flexibility that they can’t have when they maintain a high head count.
Of course, many people wind up self-employed not entirely by choice—one of the reasons the Kelly Services figure jumped seven percentage points in 3 years is that the U.S. unemployment rate also spiked during this time, even if, broadly, economists report that self-employment is not particularly countercyclical. That is, people don’t choose to work for themselves just because they can’t get other jobs. For many people, going solo is about push and pull factors.
Marc Matsumoto, for instance, always loved to cook. As a kid, he baked his own birthday cakes. In early 2008, this New York City resident started a blog at NoRecipes.com to celebrate freestyle culinary arts. But he didn’t have much energy to cook or blog because, as the head of marketing at a finance-related startup, he was having trouble planning his schedule to give himself concentrated blocks of free time. He could shop for groceries and experiment in the kitchen only on weekends. Until December 2008, that is.
Shortly before Christmas, his employer failed to secure another round of venture capital, and Matsumoto joined the millions of Americans who lost their jobs since the recession’s onset.
It could have been a crisis, but instead, Matsumoto chose to view it as an opportunity for a career change. He drummed up enough consulting gigs to pay the bills. Then he threw himself into building his
“dream job” as a food personality. Now, he spends his weekdays perusing farmers’ markets, cooking dishes such as karaage (Japanese fried chicken) and using his marketing skills to lure 100,000 unique visitors to his site each month. Becoming a free agent was a bit of a “forced move,” he says, “but now that I’m doing it, I actually kind of like it. I wonder why I didn’t do it sooner.”
If this isn’t a career book, then it definitely isn’t a guide to starting a business. One thing to keep in mind is that entrepreneurship need not mean borrowing huge sums of money to start a high-tech giant.
Many business owners are lifestyle entrepreneurs, meaning they work solo or “try to invent the company that they would like to work for,” says Susan Sobbott, president of American Express OPEN, the division devoted to business owners. In my previous book, Grindhopping, I told young entrepreneurs to ask three
questions:
What do I love so much I’d do it for free?
How can I get someone to pay me to do that?
If there’s no obvious job title in an organization doing what I love (and often there isn’t), what’s a low-cost way I could start a business doing that, and get the cash register ringing quickly?
None of this is easy, of course. As Sobbott notes, while many people start businesses to escape the corporate grind, “none of them spend less time working. Zero.” It’s not about changing how many of your 168 hours you work, it’s about changing how much control you have over them. With self-employment, you may invent your dream gig doing what you love, as Matsumoto is doing, or you may simply change the
“love what you do” part of the equation, but if this ups the autonomy and challenge factor, this may be OK, too.
Julie Pickens and Mindee Doney, Oregon-based creators of Boogie Wipes, a line of saline-infused kids’ tissues, are examples of the latter. A few years ago, Doney was having a beastly time cleaning up the caked-on mess of snot caused by one of her children’s colds. She threw some of the saline from a nose spray on a tissue and had an epiphany. She knew Pickens—also a mom of young kids—professionally, and since both were between businesses, they decided to launch Little Busy Bodies Inc. to sell Boogie Wipes in 2007. While they love the stuff of consumer goods marketing, and like making a product that’s helpful to parents, I didn’t get the impression from talking to them that they dreamed of tissues as kids like Sylvia Earle had dreamed of waves.
Nonetheless, the second half of the equation—love what you do—is clear for both women. Running their own business has given them incredible autonomy. Before they launched, they hashed out the details of the Boogie Wipes product lines during epic play dates. Now, Pickens helps her daughters get ready for school in the mornings, then works in the office from 8:30 to 2:45, Monday through Friday. Her four-year- old often joins her around noon, after preschool, and plays in the office playroom. Yes, they have an office playroom. Why not? Pickens leaves to pick up the other kids around 3:00, and does some work from home while they do homework. After dinner and bedtime, she fires the laptop back up around nine o’clock and puts in a few more hours. She occasionally comes in on Saturday mornings, but manages to leave at least one weekend day e-mail-free. Doney, who has an infant, works from home slightly more often. After running in the mornings on the treadmill while her kids watch cartoons, she comes in to the office roughly three days a week from 9:00 to 3:00. In the afternoons, she works at home while her older kids play outside. The computer goes off during dinner, then after baths and books and prayers, she puts in another work shift during the evenings, which she does on weekends, too.
Both women work full-time hours, but since they have complete freedom to choose those hours, they also pack in a lot of family time. They give their dozen employees the same flexibility. “We hold employees to the same expectations as ourselves,” Doney says. “What I mean by that is that if they need to work at home occasionally, they work at home . . . We have faith and trust in their ability to get the work done when it needs to be done.”
They also appreciate being challenged at close to the extent of their abilities. They describe their first two years running Little Busy Bodies as the equivalent of earning their MBAs. For instance, here’s a problem Doney and Pickens had to solve recently: How do you get a product into Wal-Mart? The answer:
you find the right person who knows the inside scoop. You play up the fact that you are a women-owned business. You show up in Bentonville, Arkansas, with a pitch that is not just about the product’s efficacy, but about its story as the creation of mompreneurs who are just like the target-market moms, and who give the products an authenticity modern consumers crave. Most important, you show them how your product will make them money and that you know how to manage your enterprise. Then when the buyer says yes,
you watch your company’s sales go north of $5 million in less than 2 years in business. You set a goal to sell the company to a major consumer goods brand in the next 5 years, and use the cash to start something else fun, flexible, and as satisfyingly tough as getting dried snot off a wriggling toddler’s face.