`The Entrepreneur's Corner'
By Pierre A. Clark
The Road To Entrepreneurship: How To Travel It Successfully
Is entrepreneurship your dream? If so, you are not alone. Nearly everyone in America dreams of becoming self-employed and starting and running a business. Self-employment is both the American dream and an economic alternative for an increasing number of people. African Americans, Asians, Hispanics and other minorities especially, have a great deal to gain from starting and operating businesses, namely, the opportunity to create secure jobs and personal wealth.
"The Entrepreneur's Corner" can be your guide if you want to learn how to create personal wealth through entrepreneurship and starting and operating your own business. If you are planning to start your business, we offer tips and techniques to get started successfully, to avoid income droughts and other start-up blues and generate higher and more consistent income. If you are already in business, our ideas on how to build a client base, promote and market your products and services, create high-profit strategic alliances and invest your income with savvy and knowledge have worked for thousands; we know they will work for you.
There are social issues that create poverty in residents and communities, such as racism and disinvestment by banks and other institutions. We choose to focus on positive steps you can take,
through entrepreneurship, to create opportunity for yourself and your family and overcome the challenges we all know are there. Healthy communities feature high-growth businesses owned by
residents of those communities which employ other residents and keep income circulating within communities. The bottom line is that if you don't own it, you can't run it.
There are techniques and strategies that entrepreneurs use everyday to overcome the challenges to entrepreneurship and build high-profit businesses. For example, a single store in one of Chicago's poorest neighborhoods generates $5 million a year and hundreds of residents make $100,000 a year or more doing everything from painting to song-writing.
What we'll be discussing in each issue is not speculative, get-rich-quick strategies but proven techniques that tens of thousands have used to start, build, grow and manage successful
businesses. After four years of publishing columns in the Chicago area on self-employment and entrepreneurship, I've heard directly from over 4,000 people who say they use the techniques we've suggested to successfully start and operate their own businesses.
Can you start a business with no upfront cash? Can you acquire free resources such as computers, meeting space, furniture to build your business? Can you generate free publicity for your business, get ads in popular media at no cost? The answer to all these questions is yes, as you'll discover here.
Self-employment offers you the opportunity to change your life, take positive steps to take control of your life and generate the kind of income that would only be a dream if you were working for someone else.
Many people ask: Can you really become a millionaire from starting your own business? My answer is this: Around 99 percent of the people who are millionaires become millionaires from and through their own businesses. If you want to earn $50,000 or more per year, you have a 98 percent chance of earning it in your own business, but only a two percent chance of earning this sum working for someone else. Clearly, the road to high income and financial independence can better be reached through your own business.
We believe the keys to successfully starting your own business are learning and applying success techniques that hundreds of thousands, who started with no dollars or a few dollars, have used to achieve success. Applying them successfully doesn't depend on whether you are male or female, Black, white or Hispanic or Asian, working, unemployed or on welfare. All that matters is how diligently you work the techniques and how determined you are to achieve success.
Are you ready to start, operate and maintain a successful business enterprise and learn how thousands of others have done the same thing? Are you ready to learn how to use that business to
build the kind of life that you want? You've come to the right place. Join us here each issue.
Pierre A. Clark is a nationally-known entrepreneurship/self-employment columnist. For a free sample copy of his newsletter, "Self-Employment Simplified," send a S.A.S.E. to Pierre Clark, 601 South LaSalle Street, 6th Floor, Suite C-818-EC, Chicago, IL, 60605.