Self-employment thrives as economy stabilizes

http://www.charlesprimas.com/

http://www.detroitbusinesstoday.net

Self-employment thrives as economy stabilizes

By Ebony Horton Published: April 21, 2010

http://www2.dothaneagle.com/

Perryion Griffin Jr. knew as a kid that he wanted to be self-sufficient.

Five years after opening up his own barber shop in Daleville, 31-year-old Griffin is still among those calling their own shots after one of the worst economic crises the nation has seen.
“It’s been tough, like any business, but instead of worrying about losing a job or making big people millions by me making chump change, I might as well put the change in my own pocket and work for myself. People will always need haircuts, so I’m meeting a demand,“ said Griffin, who owns Fadez 4 Dayz barber shop in Daleville.

Residents throughout the country have invested in their own businesses since the economy appeared to turn for the worst two years ago.

Some of those businesses in the Wiregrass remain secure, and more self-owned businesses in fields like healthcare, farming, sales and service are expected to rise even more in the state through year 2014, according to the state Department of Industrial Relations.
Earl Eutsey, who owns The Crab Shack in Ozark, said he opened up shop last year as an opportunity to do better for himself.

“When you know how it feels to lose a job and then you find something where you can do better for yourself, it’s good. Times have been hard sometimes, as with anything, but this has been my dream,“ Eutsey said.

Phil Holland is the founder of http://www.myownbusiness.org, a resource for entrepreneurs seeking to start their own businesses.

Holland said traffic to the Web site over the last two years has increased monthly to as many as 400,000 visitors, some of which may have had no other option but to start their own career.
“This country hit a time for some of these people where there was not the alternative of a job. They had to find something, whether it was a business from home in addition to their career,“ said Holland, who founded multiple businesses in California.

Holland said some key basics to starting a business would be to start small with a minimum investment and build over time, as well as establishing some kind of web traffic to market the business.

“The basics of business are spelled out pretty clearly. You don’t make mistakes. Our Web site has 16 different sessions that show you mistakes in any one of those can blow up a business. But if educated, you can have an understanding of where the pitfalls are,“ he said.

Some other opportunities for self-employment include participating in larger corporations.
Alfred Alexander, a retired Army command sergeant major and a business owner who sells products and services for Fortune Hi Tech Marketing, said he became a part of Fortune because of its income potential.

“This is a business model that an individual can do without regard of education, experience or current financial situation and can help them reach their financial goals,“ he said.
Alexander’s business partner, Marilyn Jinks, agreed.

“Fortune’s compensation plan afforded me the opportunity to build residual income over time and the ability to make a substantial income while the residual income is building. This has been my sole focus for a year,“ she said.

Your Job In 2020

http://www.charlesprimas.com/
http://www.detroitbusinesstoday.net/

http://www.forbes.com/

Your Life In 2020
Your Job In 2020
Martin Ford 04.08.10, 6:00 PM ET

The greatest economic challenge the United States faces in the coming decade will be reversing its dismal unemployment situation. The past decade has been an unmitigated disaster for job creation.

To keep pace with population growth and prevent the unemployment rate from rising, the economy needs to consistently create between 1 million and 2 million new jobs per year. Yet private-sector employment has actually fallen over the last 10 years; the U.S. now employs at least a million fewer people than it did in 1999.

What are the prospects for turning things around by 2020? Some analysts are sanguine. A recent report sponsored by the MetLife Foundation predicts that due to a gradually aging workforce, the U.S. may in fact actually face an overall worker shortage as early as 2018.

What this type of demographic analysis misses is the extraordinary acceleration we are likely to see in information technology. Already job automation technology has had a dramatic impact on employment over the past decade. In the manufacturing sector factories that continue to operate in the U.S. are able to survive only by automating the production process as much as possible.

In the service sector automation often comes in the guise of self-service: ATMs, automated checkout isles and online banking are just a few areas in which technology allows customers to do the jobs that once required workers. Meanwhile, advances in information and communications technology have accelerated the globalization of corporate workforces--in particular the trend toward offshore outsourcing, or "offshoring," where jobs are transferred to low-wage countries.

While the technological progress over the past decade has been dramatic, it's nothing compared to what we can expect in the next 10 years. Historically, advances in computing power have followed Moore's Law, which stipulates that computing capability roughly doubles every two years. There will always be the natural inclination to assume we will witness the same degree of progress in the next 10 years that we saw in the last 10--but that view is deceivingly simple. It fails to account for the exponential nature of technological advances.

If Moore's Law holds throughout the next decade, we can expect that the power of computing will increase by a factor of approximately 32. That's 32 times the technical capability we have now--and there is every reason to expect that dramatic increase in computing power will be leveraged to drive down costs by automating jobs.

Automation technology will continue to hit hardest in the areas where we have come to expect it: the manufacturing sector and low-wage, unskilled jobs of all types. Yet the reality is that by 2020 we will also see increasing penetration of automation into occupations that require significant training and college degrees. The six-figure knowledge workers who now inhabit oceans of corporate cubicles will be heavily threatened by software automation and specialized artificial intelligence applications that can perform many of the routine tasks and analyses that occupy their days.

Where technology is not yet sufficient for full automation, businesses are likely to turn to offshoring as an interim solution. Advancing software tools--in some cases enhanced by technologies such as machine learning--will continually upgrade the capabilities of low-wage offshore workers. As both job automation and offshoring become cheaper and more accessible, both practices are likely to be employed increasingly by the small businesses that have historically been responsible for the bulk of U.S. job creation.

---

Many dismiss this rather pessimistic view by pointing to the fact that, while technology eliminates jobs, it also creates new industries and employment sectors. This argument glosses over the fact that new technology-based industries tend to be capital intensive: they do not employ large numbers of people. Compare McDonalds with Google: In 2008 McDonalds employed 400,000 people with revenue of $59,000 per worker. Google had just 20,000 employees--each of which brought in, on average, over a million dollars in revenue. The question we have to ask is: What happens when McDonald's begins to look more like Google?

Advancing technology may indeed create more Googles, but the same progress is almost certain to eventually have a highly disruptive impact on employment in the more traditional, labor-intensive industries that employ the bulk of the workforce--potentially eliminating entire job categories by 2020.

The economy of 2020 may well be characterized by substantial, broad-based and ever increasing structural unemployment, as well as by stagnant or plunging consumer spending and confidence. Mainstream economists, content to rely on quantitative models built in the last century, are largely oblivious to and ill-equipped for the reality of the next decade.

If 2020 finds us on the brink of an age in which our workers are becoming increasingly superfluous, any solutions to the problem will likely be radical and, by 2010 standards, politically unthinkable. By 2020 solutions will have to be found. Ultimately the viability of capitalism and of our democratic institutions will demand it.

Martin Ford is the author of The Lights in the Tunnel: Automation, Accelerating Technology and the Economy of the Future and blogs regularly at econfuture.wordpress.com.