Small business ownership sounds less appealing than entrepreneurship

Ambitious business people
don’t want to think small. Mark Zuckerberg
pictured.
Paul Marotta/Getty
Images

• Starting a business
  and keeping it small is less appealing to many Americans than
  launching a startup and scaling it big.
• Morra Aarons-Mele coined the term “entrepreneurship
  porn” to describe the unrealistic glamorization of the
  entrepreneurial lifestyle. It’s the latest in a series of
  myths, she said, about what success looks like.
• Aarons-Mele said entrepreneurship porn lures many
  ambitious young Americans into entrepreneurship as opposed to
  small business ownership, even if that might not be the best
  choice for them.

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“The first word in ‘small business’ is ‘small,'” said Morra Aarons-Mele. It’s a
descriptor that few Americans aspire to.

“We spend a lot of time telling ambitious people not to think
small,” Aarons-Mele added. That’s why she thinks the prospect of
entrepreneurship — and the desire to be the next Elon Musk or
Mark Zuckerberg — is especially powerful in the US. “It’s a very
American thing to be an entrepreneur.”

Aarons-Mele is the founder of Women Online and The Mission List.
She appears to have coined the term “entrepreneurship
porn” in a 2014
Harvard Business Review article, to describe “an airbrushed
reality in which all work is always meaningful and running your
own business is a way to achieve better work/life harmony.”

Unfortunately, the realities of entrepreneurship don’t always
match the fantasy, according to Aarons-Mele and other experts.
For one thing, many startups ultimately fail, sometimes due to
the founders’ ignorance and sometimes due to market factors.

Entrepreneurs typically have grander ambitions than small
business owners — but that comes with risk

While entrepreneurship and small-business ownership overlap,
there are important differences between them. Specifically,
entrepreneurs typically focus on scaling their business, while
small-business owners don’t necessarily.

Rates of entrepreneurship and small-business ownership in the US
can vary, depending on the data source. A report from the
Kauffman Foundation shows that the rate of business owners
stayed roughly the same between 2011 and 2015, but the current
level of business ownership is lower than in decades past.

However, another report from the
Kauffman Foundation shows that high-growth entrepreneurship
has rebounded from the financial crisis and is now increasing.
High-growth entrepreneurship refers to how quickly startups grew
in their first five years, the share of firms reaching beyond 50
employees by their 10th year of operation, and the prevalence of
firms with at least 20% annualized growth over three years and at
least $2 million in annual revenue.

It’s not clear that being an entrepreneur is preferable to being
a small business owner, or vice versa. To be sure, it depends on
the individual.

Whether you’re an entrepreneur or a small business owner, you’ll
have to make some lifestyle sacrifices

To help disillusion aspiring founders, Aarons-Mele drew a line
between the lifestyle of a successful entrepreneur and a
successful small business owner in
The Wall Street Journal: “Small-business owners who don’t
grow beyond their community, or don’t devote their time to
promoting themselves online, will not get accolades. You won’t be
featured in magazines nor invited to give keynote speeches for
enjoying your life and getting plenty of sleep.”

Interestingly, Gene Marks, an author who runs a 10-person
consulting firm,
wrote in Forbes that “many of the entrepreneurs I know prefer
passion over profits.” He added that legendary entrepreneurs like
Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos are “out to change the world.” While
they might not mind the money, they “love what they do and would
do it for much, much less.”

Small business owners, on the other hand, “don’t necessarily love
what they do, but are still happy doing it because it means
they’re not doing it for someone else.  Business owners,
more so than entrepreneurs, are doing it for the money.”

Aarons-Mele sees “entrepreneurship porn” as the “latest in a
string of myths that we [Americans] tell ourselves” around
success, starting with the
rags-to-riches tales of Horatio Alger. When it comes to
starting a small business, she told me, “it’s a lot of what I
think ambitious people might even want to escape versus create.”

As for her own career, Aarons-Mele has called herself a “hermit
entrepreneur.” She
told Lifehacker: “Over the last decade, I’ve built a life
that allows me to earn enough money and find just enough
recognition without driving myself crazy and sacrificing my
homebody self.”

She admitted that’s meant “less success than some peers, and a
slower path.” Still, she told Lifehacker, “it’s my version of
success, and I love it.”