Oct

27

Show me nothing but money

October 27, 2006 |

You know, this is a recurring theme for me and I’ll confess that I have some trouble with it.

Anita Campbell posted earlier this week about the Make Mine A Million awards ceremony, which she attended in NYC. She writes:

“Women own half of the businesses in the United States, yet less than 3% have revenues greater than $1 Million,” said U. S. Senator Hillary Clinton at last night’s Make Mine a Million awards ceremony in New York. The Make Mine a Million awards are designed to change those numbers, and grow the percentage of women-owned businesses with over $1 Million in annual revenue.

Now, don’t get me wrong. That’s a laudable goal. I don’t really know all that many people who would turn down $1 million or more a year if you offered it to them. And I think that if you want to grow your business like that, you should and you should get all the support you need from whoever is out there to support you.

But I’ve talked to enough women running microbusinesses around the country — and men, too, for that matter — who haven’t grown their businesses to million dollar businesses simply because they don’t want to.

So … what’s wrong with that?

See, the way I see it, owning your own businesses isn’t necessarily about making buckets upon buckets of money and building an empire. Sure, some people want to do that. But all of them want to create a certain kind of life for themselves. That’s really what it’s about.

And for many microbusiness owners, creating the kind of life they want involves a deliberate decision not to grow their businesses to those upper eschelon revenue levels. They just don’t want to go there.

The tacit message that exists everywhere in the small business universe is that there is something wrong with that kind of — um — “lack of ambition,” if you want to call it that. And I think that’s wrong.

Is it always the case that the best thing any microbusiness owner can do for themselves, their families, their communities and their country is to grow their business as big as it can possibly get?

Not necessarily.

We’re always recognizing small businesses for growing. Rarely do we recognize them for doing well or for doing good. And when we do recognize them for being good people and making positive contributions to their communities, there is usually some kind of string attached in the form of “did good stuff and grew their businesses a whole bunch.”

I don’t think that’s fair. I don’t think that’s what small business ownership in America is really all about.

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Comments

1 Comment so far

  1. Mary’s Blog » Friday Musings on January 23, 2007 12:39 pm

    […] Show Me the Money! Dawn does some good thinking re small businesses, making millions and our definitions of success. Having been a millionaire on paper a time or two, I know how much fun it is to even think what you’d do with all that dinero. […]

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