I Am An Entrepreneur

After being laid off from the position I held for the past three years, and thinking that was my employment for the next twenty years, I wasn’t as frightened as I might have been in times past, as I wound my way home that day. I knew it would be a shock to my family once I arrived home in the middle of the day (the company allowed that I would work until noon before dropping the axe). My family is in the same boat as I think many Americans are: without sufficient funding to sustain any prolonged period of unemployment, this by my own misdirected efforts, no blame being affixed except towards myself.

So, my thirty-minute car ride home gave me a few moments to consider what the next step should be. The rapidly failing economy exposes the old paradigm left over from the 50s, that being to complete high school, graduate from college with a degree, get a career, retire in thirty years, and that method seems to be defunct nowadays. I arrived at the conclusion that this could be a most opportune time to launch out as an entrepreneur, to start my own business, something that I had tried in the past in my previous line of employment, but this time I would go in an entirely new direction. This new direction is also designed to build up sufficient cash reserves to sustain my family over an extended period of time, so that we don’t fall into the same rut we found ourselves in currently. This new direction has the possibility to raise the living standard of people who may simply go by the old paradigm (except that paradigm only works for a brief period—there are statistics and anecdotes about the fluid nature of the workforce, changing positions every few years or so. This new direction has the possibility of contributing to an industry that desperately needs more people to fill present and future positions.

I have had a passion for flight that I was unable to realize as a young man when I had the notion to be a fighter pilot—a notion many of my age group carried, what with the Vietnam War and the Apollo spacecraft program in full swing, and my father working for the civil service at the Navy base in Pensacola, and that kept me in close proximity to aviation. However, my eyesight was not uncorrected to 20/20 then, and remains so to this day, and besides that, my mathematics abilities were sorely lacking.

Here is a brief of the idea I had been considering off and on over the past two years, that has arisen from my interaction with young people over the past years:

“I want to fill a real need for pilots and other skilled aviation trades. The average age of pilots is approaching Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) mandated limits, creating upwards of a nineteen percent increase in pilot vacancies by 2012 and continuing from there, in addition to related support activities—line service personnel, flight trainers, and mechanics, even flight attendants, customer service positions and the like.

“As college degrees become more expensive and lengthy to obtain, while at the same time having less of an impact on career earnings, young people are looking not only for satisfying jobs, but more non-monetary and personal time advantages from their work lives, and quality of the work environment. A large portion of high school (and even college) students don’t know what their career goals are, nor what path they may interest them.

“I seek to address this by offering introductory flights to interested young people along with an introduction to flight instructing, airframe & power plant (A&P) mechanics and line/fixed base operator services that will enable them to either enter the job market or gain a definite advantage in applying to aviation/aerospace universities as they move on towards higher college degrees.

“Facilities will be located at the local airport, in an aircraft hangar suitable for single and multi-engine general aviation aircraft and enough space for office, maintenance/mechanical, and teaching activities. Original projections are for a minimum of five students, with additional students as the demand requires.

“Prospective clients be identified through local schools, churches, and social websites such as Facebook©, Linked In©, and other social, church, non-profit, and youth programs and other related Internet sites. The target audience is junior high and high school students, and college students, generally freshmen and sophomores, and higher level students as requests are received or interest is shown.

“The object is to act as a funnel for placing people into the aviation and aerospace markets to fulfill the shortage of talent, and to provide a profitable future to a demographic segment (mis-directed and un-directed youth) that needs more choices for their careers.”

The driving force behind this is the entrepreneurial spirit that has built this country. Even though many who came to the New World on those first boats were escaping religious and other persecutions, and failing economies in their home countries, once here, they knew they had to eke out a living in order to survive. That survival mentality metamorphosed into the entrepreneurial spirit that we have today, that has provided innumerable jobs, and opportunities that have never been seen prior to this United States. Even in economic downturns, perhaps especially in those times, the entrepreneurial spirit is not only desired, it is necessary, cannot be done without, and it becomes the driving force to grow the economy out of its downturns, creating the wealth that pulls a struggling economy out of its doldrums. Spending by the public sector, since it cannot create wealth, only serves to blunt the wealth-building capabilities of entrepreneurs, by doing what it can only do: siphon off the wealth being created, to pay for social programs that may seem good for the populace, but also carry an anchor that weighs on the economy. This only deprives the nation of the capital required to fund startup businesses, to provide capital for expansion of existing businesses (that once were an entrepreneurs’ dream) through the pressure of additional taxes, to pay the inevitable costs, levied on entrepreneurs. This of course discourages wealth creation and growth of startups, leading to entrepreneurs holding on to their ideas while waiting for the tax structure to change back to a form that is more acceptable to them.

This entrepreneurial spirit, this yearning to provide a better mouse trap, this driving engine of our country, CANNOT, may I repeat, CANNOT, be produced through a government agency or a social program, no matter how well meaning. It comes from the heart of people like me who perceive a need and have an over-powering desire to bring that need to life, and in the process, produce income for themselves that flows over into livelihood for others, and further contributes to capital formation, so the next in line entrepreneur may have a chance to succeed, to build up another idea, and the cycle continues from there. If not for entrepreneurs and the entrepreneurial spirit, there would be no basis for any government, no basis for any community, no starting point for a government to begin, as there would not be people to support it through their toils, through their efforts, through their dreams, thus producing a firm base for a society that then needs a form of government to protect it, to provide a safe place for them to thrive, and in extension, for the country as a whole to exist, to survive, to build a great country.

The wealth that is created is the lifeblood of this market economy that has made us the envy of the world, and provided the ability for others to come to our shores to share in this great experiment we call the United States of America. It is we entrepreneurs who help to make this country great!