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6 Reasons Why People Are Afraid to Start a Business

Starting a new business can be a turbulent undertaking. For one thing, there are no guarantees of success. Businesses fail every single day, and plenty of entrepreneurs come away with nothing to show for months or years of hard-fought effort. The idea of sacrificing a steady salary for an uncertain, hoped-for payday also tends to provoke anxiety.

While some are undeterred by these obstacles, others opt to play it safe and scrap their business plans altogether. Below are six of the most prevailing reasons why people are afraid to start businesses (and whether they make sense.)

1. The Economy

Some of the most common fears about starting businesses relate to how “the economy” is doing. If the economy is in a lull, many would be entrepreneurs assume that now must necessarily be the wrong time to get started. This belief is reinforced by nay-saying politicians and journalists who exaggerate even the very worst economic news.

Is The Government Stimulus Plan Doing Anything For Entrepreneurs?

Every recession inspires government leaders to enact an economic stimulus plan. The assumption is that market downturns are intolerable and can only be cured by political intervention. Yet, it is unclear whether stimulus packages like President Barack Obama’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 stimulate anything other than government spending.

The way to know for sure is to determine what, if anything, such plans do for entrepreneurs. John T. Reed, a Harvard MBA, points out that what actually needs stimulating is business profits, which supply the money for defense, Social Security payments, employee salaries/wages, business taxes and ultimately, the stimulus itself.

What Was Stimulated

The question of whether the stimulus is working, therefore, is really a question of whether it helps entrepreneurs be more profitable. Some aspects of the stimulus do appear to help. Read more »

Why a Recession is the Perfect Time to Start a Business

Recessions are frequently associated with bankruptcy, layoffs and business failures. For seemingly the entire duration, we are fed a steady diet of recession-related negativity by politicians and journalists. Unemployment soars, despair builds, and it seems like the worst is always yet to come. It might sound counter-intuitive, then, to suggest that a recession might be the perfect time to start a new business. But the idea makes more sense than many give it credit for.

For all the pain and hardships recessions cause, they also create unique opportunities for savvy entrepreneurs in general and certain types of businesses in particular. Today, Grasshopper explores why recessions can be an ideal time to get a business off the ground.

Lower Pressure & Expectations

A common barrier to starting a business is fear of failure. Entrepreneurs are often chastised by friends or family to pursue something more realistic (like a “guaranteed” job or career) than the company they dream of starting. Read more »

How to Save by Building Your Business in the Cloud

Much has been made in the last decade of how businesses will eventually run their operations “in the cloud.” The strongest case for business cloud computing is arguably the cost. Many cloud computing providers bill like a utility does – that is, you pay for what you used, not a flat fee (which is often more expensive than what you used.)

However, for all the hype about cloud computing, few possess an actual game plan for positioning their business to tangibly benefit from it. Below, Grasshopper provides ten specific services you can use to put business functions like bandwidth, e-mail, document creation and budgeting in the cloud immediately – and begin saving money every single day.

Servers and Bandwidth

One of the most substantial costs an Internet business (and many non-Internet businesses) contends with are those involving servers and bandwidth. Innumerable businesses require raw computing power to display web pages, send e-mails, stream audio or video and more. Following are several services that allow you to pay on demand for bandwidth from the cloud.

Amazon S3