Advice for entrepreneurs: be aggressive.

A recent study by the National Federation of Independent Businesses found that nearly 3.5 million people started businesses in 1995. While this may seem like a surprisingly high number of new businesses, preliminary findings from a research project I have been involved in suggest that more than 7 million adults are trying to start businesses in the United States at any given time.

The number of people actively engaged in entrepreneurship in the United States is larger than the number of people having children! Indeed, some surveys have found that over 40 percent of U.S. workers are seriously considering working for themselves.

Given that tens of millions of people are thinking about becoming entrepreneurs, and that millions of people are actively engaged in trying to start new businesses, are there any strategies for improving the odds of self employment?

There are, in fact, a number of activities that budding entrepreneurs should consider, as a way of improving the odds of successfully getting into business.

My colleagues and I decided to explore why some budding entrepreneurs got into business while other budding entrepreneurs did not, by tracking individuals who were identified as taking steps to found a new business but who had not yet succeeded in making the transition to new business ownership. We tracked these nascent entrepreneurs for 18 months.

Three broad questions were addressed:

(1) What activities do nascent entrepreneurs initiate in attempting to establish a new business? (2) How many activities do nascent entrepreneurs initiate during the business start-up process? and (3) When are particular activities initiated or completed?

After 18 months, nearly 48 percent of the nascent entrepreneurs reported they had gotten a business in operation - they had started a business. More than 20 percent had given up and were no longer actively trying to establish a business they had given up. Almost one-third of the respondents reported they were still trying to establish a firm - they were still trying.

Nascent entrepreneurs who were able to start a business were more aggressive in making their businesses real. They undertook activities that made their businesses tangible to others: They looked for facilities and equipment, sought and got financial support, formed a legal entity, organized a team, bought facilities and equipment, and devoted full time to the business.

Individuals who started businesses act with a greater level of intensity. They undertook more activities than those individuals who did not start. The pattern of activities indicate that individuals who started firms put themselves into the day-to-day process of running an ongoing business as quickly as they could, and that these activities resulted in starting firms that generated sales (94 percent of the entrepreneurs) and positive cash flow (50 percent of the entrepreneurs).

What is not known is how successful or profitable these new firms will be over time. For example, 50 percent of the finns that were started had not reached positive cash flow, and these firms may have been started by individuals who were foolhardy and rushed into operation of a business that can not be sustainable.

The pattern of activities for the group of entrepreneurs who gave up seem to indicate that these entrepreneurs discovered that their initial idea for their businesses would not lead to success. What seemed to separate individuals who gave up from those who were still trying was that those who gave up had "tested" their ideas out, and found that they would not work according to their expectations.

Nascent entrepreneurs who gave up seemed to be similar in their activity patterns compared to those who started their firms, that is, individuals who gave up pursued the activities of creating a business in a aggressive manner at the beginning of the process, but as the business unfolded over time, these entrepreneurs decreased their activities and then ceased start-up activities.

This group of individuals might be seen as either having the wisdom to test their ideas out before jumping into something that might lead to failure, or lacking the flexibility to find more creative ways to solve the problems that they were confronted with.

Those budding entrepreneurs who are "still trying" are not putting enough effort into the start-up process in order to find out whether they should start the business, or give up. The "still trying" had undertaken fewer activities than individuals in the other two groups. The "still trying" entrepreneurs were devoting their short-term efforts towards activities internal to the start-up process (e.g., saving money and preparing a plan) and less effort towards activities that would make the business real to others.

The "still trying" entrepreneurs seem to be all talk, and little action. Our advice to individuals considering a business start-up is to aggressively pursue opportunities in the short term, because you will quickly learn that these opportunities will either reveal themselves as worthy of start-up, or poor choices that should be abandoned.

William B. Gartner is the Henry W. Simonsen Chair in Entrepreneurship at the University of Southern California's Entrepreneur Program.