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Business Startup is Good!Why is business startup important to America? by Debbie Wicker Many people believe the American Dream is dead. I disagree. I think it’s alive and well and as our economy continues to transition, new opportunities will open up allowing those with ambition and guts to take advantage of them. My father went from being a low-paid worker living in the inner-city with five children and few prospects to owning four grocery stores and living in a nice home in the suburbs. He transitioned his entire family from subsistence living to the middle class because he had the guts and talent to make those stores work. I’m still reaping the rewards of his efforts. Because of my father's business startup Our entire family (I’m the youngest of five children) moved into the middle class and stayed there. The creation of a small business facilitated that transition. As businesses go, it wasn’t a rousing success, but its impact on my life and the lives of my brothers and sisters, was more than significant. “Why is small business GOOD for America?” I began to consider the question and have come to the conclusion that small business, or I should say starting your own small business, is what has defined America for 225 years and is the engine for the “American Dream”. Historically, a person was born to a certain station in life and there was little upward mobility; business startup is not even considered. If you were born in the lower class you stayed in the lower class, with little or no expectation of mobility. In most countries around the world this is still true and it’s still the issue that holds people in poverty. America is different. The difference is ANYONE can start a new small business at ANY time. There are few impediments to starting your own business and surprisingly MOST wealth creation starts as a small business. Bill Gates dropped out of college to start a SMALL computer company. Steve Jobs and others were tinkering in a garage and invented the Apple computer. Oprah Winfrey thought see would start her own daytime talk show. Sam Walton decided to create a general store on a distribution model that he thought was genius. It turned out he was right. These are extraordinary examples, but every day new millionaires are created in the US and almost ALWAYS the path to wealth began by starting a small business. The “American Dream” is a dream of upward mobility that says, “I can achieve ANYTHING I put my mind to and small business is generally the path that delivers on that dream. Why is America so different? I’ve worked in England, Australia, Japan, Canada, Mexico, France, Italy and Ireland. The cultures in all of those places were similar in one respect; children generally did as their parents did. They have no expectation of mobility or change. If their parents work 80 hours a week in the family restaurant they tend to do the same. No questions asked. In our culture, for better or worse, children are restless. They don’t want to do as their parents have done, and they want something NEW, EXCITING and CHALLENGING. They want to experience things that their parents haven’t experienced. Many times this energy causes them to stat their own business and the success of that business delivers the mobility and experience they’re looking for. Why is small business important to America? It’s important because small business is the engine that delivers the American Dream and helps move people from working a low-paying job into a new social class.
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