The first thing that today’s entrepreneurs have going for them is an increasingly supportive environment. Here are the five major entrepreneurial trends that are helping more and more entrepreneurs succeed:

Trend 1: Service Economy
The fact that the economy is becoming more service based has helped democratize entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurs typically rely on their personal savings and assets to get their companies started. Service businesses by their very nature are typically time-intensive and require little startup capital.

Businesses from tax accounting to lawn mowing don’t need much money to get off the ground and can be run from your home until you gain enough momentum. While 80 percent of new businesses fail within five years of operation, in the service industry, entrepreneurs who work from home have a much higher rate of success. The sustainability rate is 98 percent for legal services, 65 percent for management consultants, and 60 percent for engineers, architects, and accountants.

With low overhead costs and a higher success ratio it’s no wonder why so many entrepreneurs are striking out on their own in the service sector!

Trend 2: Role Models
The easiest way to achieve success is to model the strategies of other successful people. They have proven that their method of doing business works – all it takes is for you to apply it to your business. Seeing someone else achieve great success also gives people just the right amount of confidence to believe they can do the same! Today, there are ever more role models to imitate. Every major corporation at some point in time was started by one person who had an idea and started working towards it. The biggest companies in the world – Wal-Mart, Microsoft, General Electric – were all created by entrepreneurs like Sam Walton, Bill Gates, and Thomas Edison who started with nothing and went on to build huge empires.

Most of today’s high technology companies, for example, have been created by one individual within one lifetime. It no longer takes generations of work to build a successful company. In today’s world we are also seeing high school students building multimillion dollar businesses. We now have a wealth of individuals from many different backgrounds to look up to, learn from, and model.

Part 2 continued next week…

Evan Carmichael