Chris Hampton is the Tennessee-based owner of Boogie Heads, an entertainment technology company that sells party equipment to entrepreneurs in the events industry. In this article, the father of five boys explains why he believes entrepreneurship is on the rise in America today.
With the economy the way it is right now, many people are discovering that the stable jobs they thought they would be working at their entire lives are not so stable anymore. For more and more people, that big 401k account they had been saving their money for all of their lives and the 20-year job they were planning to retire from someday are not working out the way they had planned.
A lot has changed since the days our fathers and grandfathers were starting out in the work force. It is beginning to look like the idea that a person can have one stable job their entire life is becoming antiquated.
I get a lot of calls from people who are interested in starting their own business. People often call my company, Boogie Heads, to tell me that they are getting fired from a job they have always had. What this has taught them, they say to me, is that they can no longer rely on any one employer. And, people are increasingly getting in on the entrepreneurial game.
I am hearing the same thing from individuals and couples of all ages who are getting out of the corporate world and becoming interested in the idea of starting a business of their own. One of the main reasons they are thinking so closely about doing this is the instability we are seeing today in American corporate culture.
At Boogie Heads, we sell people all the equipment they need to start a Boogie Heads party entertainment company on their own. One of the biggest benefits of this type of entrepreneurial business is that people can set their own hours, and enjoy the flexibility that comes with that. It may sound cliché, but one of the biggest benefits to becoming your own boss is that you can decide how much you are willing to work in any given week or month.
So if a Boogie Heads equipment owner wants to stay busy and be jammed up with events for the next 25 weeks straight, he can do that. But if an owner would rather take it easy and play a few rounds of golf three days a week and work just on the weekends, he can do that too.
A flexible schedule isn’t a benefit all business owners get. If you run a coffee shop or retail business, for example, you can’t just choose to work a couple different days each week. You have to be there—or pay someone else to be there—every single day that you’re scheduled to be open. But even with those types of businesses, you still have a certain level or freedom as an owner that you would not have as an individual employee. When you own your own business, you can decide how you are going to run it.
People appreciate having freedom with their business, and that is one of the biggest reasons they choose to buy a Boogie Heads system and set out on their own as sole proprietors. And even though they work harder as an entrepreneur than they would as an employee at a large corporation, they like the freedom owning their own business gives them. The entire landscape of business is changing right now: Are you going to participate?
