According to Gallup’s new report, “Entrepreneurial Insights: Ownership and Employment as a Path to Wealth and Happiness,” the majority of owner-employers ( 67%) achieve happiness. An owner-employer is defined by Gallup as an employer who works primarily as a business owner and who employs at least one other person.
Entrepreneurship has long been a path to wealth, but a Gallup study looked at how entrepreneurship impacts the lives of employee-owners beyond expanding their bank accounts. Second, adults who employ others scored higher on several measures, including income, assets, life evaluation, and work engagement, than other groups, including employees and nonemployers.
The entrepreneurial path to wealth and happiness often requires hiring others. For example, being a business owner without employees is not associated with significantly higher income, wealth, or life or job satisfaction. However, currently only 9% of business owners employ other people, and only 2.4% of all workers are owner-employers.
Other indicators of well-being include that three in four (75.4%) owner-employers report high levels of engagement at work, compared to 68.1% of non-employers and 50.9% of employees. Includes what you are reporting. Regarding financial well-being, 58.4% of owners/employers said they were living comfortably on their current income, compared to 36% of non-employers.
Moreover, owner-employers valued their lives as a whole much more highly than other workers. According to Gallup, two-thirds (66.7%) of owner-employers rate their current and future lives high enough to be considered “rich” on a scale of 0 to 10. This compares to just over half (52.1%) of non-employed people, 50.7% of employees, and 48.1% of self-employed people.
But startups are fragile, and becoming an owner and employer is not easy. According to the Annual Economic Review, 17% of employer-employee companies go out of business within their 18 months within their five years. Growing to the point of hiring others is a hurdle that most companies never overcome. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 5.4 million business applications were filed with the Internal Revenue Service in 2021. According to the bureau, only 476,000 (9%) of these were employed workers at the time of its launch.
