By Brian H. Robb
It seems nearly everyone wants to be an entrepreneur. According to Babson College’s 2018/2019 Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, United States Report, almost two-thirds of Americans believe that vocational choice to be a good one. What is surprising, however, is that 45.3 percent of the population think it’s easy to start a business. One wonders if any of these would-be entrepreneurs are familiar with the experiences of Richard Branson, founder of the Virgin Group (and recently shot into the upper atmosphere in Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo). In a 2012 interview with Rod Kurz for Entrepreneur magazine, he observed that, “Building a business from scratch is 24 hours, 7 days a week, divorces, it’s difficult to hold your family life together, it’s bloody hard work and only one word really matters—and that’s surviving.”All too often, dreamers strive to create successful companies, but are met with failure. Research published in 2012 by Shikhar Ghosh—then a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School, now a Professor of Management Practice in that School’s Entrepreneurial Management Unit—indicated that three-quarters of venture capital-backed firms don’t recover their investment. At the end of 2020, the research and policy advisory organization Startup Genome reported that a quarter of VC-funded startups had revenue drops from 20 percent to 60 percent. An additional quarter had revenue declines of more than 60 percent. More alarming still was the reveal that 40 percent of those startups had less than three months of working capital, a harbinger of future failures.
