The climate has never been better for entrepreneurs, but the startling reality is that for the past thirty years, the failure rate of new businesses hasn’t changed--and it’s pretty depressing. Whatever way you look at it, the fact is, most companies fail.
Data from the Small Business Administration and the Bureau of Labor Statistics consistently show that approximately half of new start-ups no longer exist after five years, and that approximately two-thirds will cease to be in operation ten years after founding. Dane Stangler of the Kauffman Foundation notes that approximately five hundred thousand new firms are created every year and that after five years, fewer than half of these companies will remain. Shikhar Ghosh, a senior lecturer at the Harvard Business School, looks at startups that take in outside money and finds that 30 to 40 percent fail. He defines failure as liquidating all assets, with investors losing most or all the money they put into the company. If failure is defined as not realizing the projected return on investment, then the failure rate is 70 to 80 percent.
To read the original article: Persistence, Possibility, And Whether You Can Cut It As An Entrepreneur | Fast Company
