New business start-ups a growing business opportunity

For ages I have been going on about the market demand created by older people who are, and will increasingly, starting-up their own business. The reason may be necessity or for life style reasons, Either way, it creates demands for all types of business services.

Today’s FT reports that as a result of the recession the number of British businesses will hit record levels. The director of the Centre for Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises at Warwick Business School said waves of redundancies were swelling the ranks of “necessity entrepreneurs”, who set up businesses because they have few other economic options.
If you want to look at the stats then read this paper on Business Demography.

A word of caution, especially for anybody who thinks this growth in start-ups will be the saviour of the UK’s unemployment problems. Today there is an article in Business Week - Beware the Freelance Economy.

This shows that in the US as employer businesses decline, non-employer firms are on the rise (i.e. lots of one-man/woman-bands but not companies that will not be hiring hoards of school leavers). Dick Stroud