I started blogging in 2008. I wanted to share some hard lessons I’d learned after 30 years in business (maybe training to be an accountant shouldn’t count)! Of course gradually a few people started following the blog. Slowly a few more people passed it on and now it attracts a readership in the thousands with a 15% open rate. It’s led to great clients, speaking gigs, a little book and with 450 posts, hopefully a little knowledge transfer on how to scale businesses. I’m scaling three businesses at present so no more new clients for a while!
So why do I continue to blog? Really simply put, I want to inspire the scaling of businesses and the creation of long term, sustainable job creation. The math behind my big audacious goal is worth sharing.
First I asked myself, who creates jobs? Where are people employed? The answer might surprise you. There are three buckets.
Once I understood the math my task (and I hope you will join me in this movement) was quite simple. Inspire the first two categories to hire one new person. Inspire the 21 million one man bands to make the leap to hire another body. Inspire the 5.8 million small firms to hire one more person. That’s 26.8 million new jobs. Ok, let’s go for 0.1% of that! That’s still 26,800 new jobs.
Last month the Bureau of Labor announced that 248,000 new jobs were created across the whole of the US. Surely we can do better than that! If only a tiny % of entrepreneurs (ignoring the big guys who employ 78 million people) scaled their business by one person, we would blow 248,000 new hires out of the water.
So while I can only scale a few remarkable businesses at a time (we hope to create over 50 jobs next year within these businesses), I’m motivated to inspire thousands of entrepreneurs that I can’t help directly to fulfill the potential of their businesses. That’s why I blog.
A noble cause to Blog Ian! I will take this challenge … and pass it on!