Jim Kukral – Small Business Consultant

We all develop mind-sets, or virtual images in our heads about who or what certain groups of people are like. The problem with that is we often do it without the facts, so what we “think” is right, is usually wrong. I deal with a ton of entrepreneurs so I found this report from The Kauffman foundation for entrepreneurship very interesting. They released a report titled “The Anatomy of an Entrepreneur”. It’s based on a survey of 549 company founders across a variety of industries, reports OnStartUps.com. Hat tip Dane.

Take a look at this list below. What surprised you? For me, it was definitely the median age of 40. Probably because I deal with so many Internet entrepreneurs who are younger.

1. The average and median age of company founders when they started their current companies was 40.

2. 95.1 percent of respondents themselves had earned bachelor’s degrees, and 47 percent had more advanced degrees.

3. Less than 1 percent came from extremely rich or extremely poor backgrounds

4. 15.2% of founders had a sibling that previously started a business.

5. 69.9 percent of respondents indicated they were married when they launched their first business. An additional 5.2 percent were divorced, separated, or widowed.

6. 59.7 percent of respondents indicated they had at least one child when they launched their first business, and 43.5 percent had two or more children.

7. The majority of the entrepreneurs in the sample were serial entrepreneurs. The average number of businesses launched by respondents was approximately 2.3.

8. 74.8 percent indicated desire to build wealth as an important motivation in becoming an entrepreneur.

9. Only 4.5 percent said the inability to find traditional employment was an important factor in starting a business.

10. Entrepreneurs are usually better educated than their parents.

11. Entrepreneurship doesn’t always run in the family. More than half (51.9 percent) of respondents were the first in their families to launch a business.

12. The majority of respondents (75.4 percent) had worked as employees at other companies for more than six years before launching their own companies.