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The Amish are Great Entrepreneurs
Want to find America’s most successful entrepreneurs? Skip Silicon Valley and Manhattan; head to the rural Amish enclaves.Amish businesses have an eye-popping 95% success rate at staying open at least five years, according to author Erik Wesner’s new book, Success Made Simple: An Inside Look at Why Amish Businesses Thrive.
It’s a statistic he backs up with a variety of academic surveys, drawing particularly on a 2009 report by Elizabethtown College sociology professor Donald Kraybill. Studying several Amish settlements, Kraybill found failure rates ranging from 2.6% and 4.2%; interviews with loan officers, accountants and industry professions in other Amish regions yielded additional anecdotal evidence of closure rates significantly south of 10%.
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Database Software on May 17th, 2010 7:10 pm
This is even more amazing when you consider they are culturally handcuffed regarding the use of technology.
Erik Wesner on May 17th, 2010 8:05 pm
Thanks Dane for sharing this bit on my book! CNN did a nice companion video piece as well, filmed at an Amish market.
For obvious reasons the Amish aren’t a perfect match for the rest of us, but there are a lot of things they do that can work in any context. One of my favorite lessons is the idea of humble leadership: you frequently hear the idea “I’d never ask an employee to do something I wouldn’t do myself” from Amish bosses. Refreshing in its own way.
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