This material originally appeared in the NCDA entrepreneur monograph, Starting and Growing a Business in the New Economy: Leading Career Entrepreneurs Share Stories and Strategies. Edited by Dr. Sally Gelardin. Copyright National Career Development Association, (2007). Reprinted with permission. This material can be found in the NCDA entrepreneur monograph and in Entrepreneur Kits.

Objects fly through the air,
Stars wheel
through the universe.
All fall eventually.

If we become obsessed
with definitively mastering
the decline, we are lost.

If we achieve peace
within the intervals
of rising and falling,
we find grace.

(Poem by Arthur Chandler)

Career professionals are joining the national trend of creating small businesses, either as a sole source of income, or in conjunction with other work roles. Like our clients, many of us see growing a career development business as a viable way to meet the increasing demand for career services and products. For the purposes of this monograph, career development business refers to entrepreneurial career-related choices and transitions made over one's lifespan. An entrepreneur is "someone who establishes a new entity to offer a new or existing product or service into a new or existing market, whether for a profit or not-for-profit outcome." The word that repeats in this definition is "new". Entrepreneurs bring something new to the marketplace or identify a new client base.

To provide you with a comprehensive overview of this topic, I invited successful entrepreneurs to contribute their personal stories and business strategies. In addition to running private or group career counseling practices, the contributing entrepreneurs provide a range of services and products and target a variety of populations in the field of career development... To start and grow a business, read their stories, listen to the CCA teleinterviews, and apply their exercises. You are welcome to travel with me to "entrepreneurial land to build a business and a life that you can call your own." (Read more...)