Why Local: Dreamers

Risky Business: Locally Owned Businesses

Starting your own business is risky. According to the Bureau of Labour Statistics, nearly 45% of new businesses fail within the first five years. That’s nearly half of them!

Imagine going to a pre-med class and telling the students that only half of them will make it as doctors, how many of them do you think would go through the struggle of medical school?

Day in and day out, the challenge for small business owners is to defy the odds. And just over half will make it past five years.

This means that business owners need to be innovative, creative, and hard-working. Their ideas, their concepts and their way of doing business fuel American innovation. Every American staple started as a small business. Restaurants that reconfigured the service industry, like McDonalds or Chipotle, where once your local burger joint or the corner taco kiosk.

This is not to say that every small business owner wants to expand to a multi-national chain. We want to show how the innovation of a once-small-business-owner pushed the envelope and changed the food-service industry. Whether that’s for better or for worse, that’s for you to decide.

Locally-Owned Independent Businesses and the Entrepreneurial Spirit

Entrepreneurship fuels America’s economic innovation. A community with many successful, thriving LOIBs is not only a healthier community--as we showed you on our last blog--but it inspires others to take that leap and develop their own passions.

Being able to create and grow a business, is a key part of economic mobility. In an aggregate of studies, the Institute for Local Self-Reliance found that the increasing number of large corporations is a driving factor in the growing economic inequality in America. Meanwhile, they argue that being able to start and grow a business is key for social and economic mobility.

Seeing local businesses thriving serves as inspiration for local communities to grow and start their own venture. By starting a business, the owner is taking charge of their future. This leads to growing prosperity for themselves, and their community.

Support Risk-Takers

At KLA, we focus on “micro-businesses”, these are businesses that have nine or less employees. We want to continue to support these courageous risk-takers and help them be successful so we raise and encourage the next generations of entrepreneurs.

You can help too! Take the pledge to move $20 and support risk-takers all over the country.

Sources:

• https://ilsr.org/key-studies-why-local-matters/
• https://medium.com/@BBBNWP/10-ways-small-businesses-benefit-their-local-communities-7273380c90a9
• https://www.investopedia.com/financial-edge/1010/top-6-reasons-new-businesses-fail.aspx