Why I think highly creative small businesses are the future of America

These two are old friends of mine, and BMX freestyle pioneers from the NorCal scene, Mike Golden and Chris Rothe.  They are flipping through the brand new, second edition, of The Birth of the Freestyle Movement, a catalog-sized book chronicling the rise of BMX freestyle, now a worldwide  series of recreational and competitive sports.  In the background, you see huge photos, iconic in our little world, from 1980's BMX magazines.  Mike, Chris, myself, and a few hundred other weird kids in the mid 1980's, were drawn into the obscure new sport we expected to go nowhere.  Thousands more joined us over the next few years.  By learning and inventing tricks on "little kids bicycles," we inadvertently became part of the action sports movement, one of many sprouts that have grown into worldwide sports and industries, in about 35 years.  We are a part of the huge cultural changes that have shaken and reformed human society in our lifetimes.

The biggest changes over the last 40 or 50 years are due primarily to new technology.  As we all know, this technology now allows an average person access to most of the information collected in all of human history, at any time, with a small device we carry in our pockets.  With this same device, we can instantly communicate, by text, by voice, and even by live video, to much of the human population, anywhere in the world.  This technology, and all the associated technologies, have changed everything in our world... in our lifetimes. 

The original Apple computer, shown off at the Home Brew Club in San Jose, and the birth of Microsoft, were 44 years ago.  These massive changes in human society have happened in the lifetimes of The Greatest Generation, the Baby Boomers, and most of Generation X, my age group.  We've watched this happen.  We've seen massive disruption spawned by these technologies and related social changes.

Think about going to a financial advisor back in 1989, just before the 90's recession.  He (it was a traditionally male industry then) would have advised investing in the blue chip stocks, mutual funds, and maybe real estate.  All of those things crashed in price in the few years after 1989.  What he would not have advised investing in was a BMX or mountain bike company, a snowboard company, a tattoo and piercing shop, a custom-built motorcycle business, or even Google.  Google didn't exist for several more years, and the other things were weird, fringe activities then, not something a person should invest in.  Yet any one of those businesses, properly run and managed, could have made you wealthy in the time between 1989 and now.  And those "blue chip" stocks?  There is a single person, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, worth more than many of those entire blue chip companies are now.  Think about that one for a minute.  That's serious change.

But, a huge number of people, well over a hundred million in the United States alone, are being left behind, by the changes to everyday life, to work, to business, to social norms, to housing, to education, and to our world at large.  Most people use their smart phones to communicate, yet most don't use that same technology to anywhere near its full potential to earn a living.  Whether shackled by insurmountable college debt, or balancing family with two service jobs, MOST of our population is struggling to survive day to day.  Poverty and homelessness are soaring, at a time where there are grade school kids making million dollars a year with a YouTube channel, and high school age millionaires in the social media influencer, entrepreneurial, and high tech worlds.

I'm a pretty smart guy.  Futurist thinking, real world economics, and big picture social dynamics are the things that really fascinate me.  I've spent most of my life reading about these things, observing what is predicted, and then what actually happens, and working to understand this huge transition period we're in now.  I literally wake up in the morning, even on my worst days, thinking about these things.  Yes, I'm weird, even in today's weird world.  

I've come to the conclusion that our best hope in these fast changing and and highly turbulent times, is huge growth in the number of small businesses.  

We need MILLIONS of new small businesses.  Here are the main large trends I think lead to this conclusion:

-An Oxford study 2013 said 47% of American jobs could be replaced by new technologies by about 2035 or 2040.  That's roughly 92 million MORE jobs that will likely disappear.  Yes, other new jobs will be created in that time, but not near enough to employ everyone who loses a job.

-With the research of Richard Florida and his team, we've learned about the Creative Class, and that high tech businesses are clustering in about ten major metro areas, which causes a couple of huge shifts.
     -The huge salaries and stock wealth in the tech world lead to surging real estate prices in those tech hub metros.  This leads to massive wealth inequality, and a struggle for affordable housing by most of the people, from lower end tech workers, those with massive college debt, and the large number of service workers, in the tech hub cities.
     -In the huge expanses of land where mid-sized cities, small towns, and rural areas are, most of the United States by area, civic leaders are struggling to attract businesses that can create living wage jobs for their populations. 

-The esteemed futurists, the late Alvin Toffler and his wife Heidi, described "The Third Wave," (title of their 1980 book), the shift from an industrial-based society to an information-based society.  They describe this shift as being as massive as the shift from hunter/gatherer society to agriculture, or from agriculture to industrial society.  But this big transition is happening much, much quicker than those transitions did.  The disruption, as we can see nearly everywhere, is causing most of the population to struggle on low or mid-level paying jobs.

-The massive wealth inequality, the loss of high paying manufacturing jobs over the last 30 years, the continuing loss of jobs to new technology, and the resistance to new ideas by local leaders, has led to the huge populist movements on both the Right and the Left, and political polarization.  This political polarization has led to gridlock and downright incompetence in the the political realm, at the very time when we most need smart, fast, effective change to help people, and society at large, to adapt to the rapid technological and social change.

-The huge rise in student debt is due, in large part, to the fact that Wall Street has structured, packaged, and resold much of the $1.5 trillion in U.S. student debt in SLABS, Student Loan Asset Backed Securites, nearly identical to the CDO's that triggered the 2008 economic collapse.  In the next major economic downturn, the faucet flowing money into colleges and universities will be hit incredibly hard. That cheap money to enable students will slow down dramatically.  This will mean college towns, much of the U.S., and most of the "Red State" economy, will be hit incredibly hard.  The concept of college itself is about to be disrupted, and will have to be re-invented for the 21st century, over the next decade or so.

-All this is in the economic/social dynamic sphere.  I'm not even talking about massive disruption caused by global warming, and the more intense storms, hurricanes, and floods that will disrupt tens of thousands of lives at a very fundamental level.  Losing your home or business to a major weather event is another massive form of disruption happening at the same time all these other things are happening.

I've been thinking many years about these things, and I'm always looking towards the future.  We're looking at some really intense and really tough challenges ahead.  With all these things in my mind, after many years of thinking, I think a massive surge of people going from an employee mentality to a small business/entrepreneurial mentality, is really our only long term hope.  I'm not talking about having an idea and finding an angel investor whose money you can burn for two years.  I'm talking functional, PROFITABLE, small businesses, high tech and other kinds.  There will not be major top down changes happening quick enough.  The true answer to all these massive changes will have to be D.I.Y. and grassroots responses.

I believe that there are people in every rural area, every small town, and every mid-sized city who already have the ideas needed in those areas.  But those people are fighting against their own personal fears, people resistant to new ideas, entrenched local power structures, and at least a few, powerful local curmudgeons.  If we can empower the people throughout the country, who already  have the good ideas, to make the leap from being an employee to being a FUNCTIONAL small business person, to build what their local area needs, we rebuild America, and the economy, from the ground up.  These millions of new small businesses are the only hope I see to put the remaining employees to work in the future that we're heading into.
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A month ago, I got tapped to use my blogging and social media skills to help promote an old friend's bike business, and help it transition from upscale bike shop to viable online bike business.  At the same time, I'm now back in Southern California, I have to rebuild my own life, and build my own income back up to a reasonable level.  I'm actually doing what I'm talking about here, on a day to day level. 

This is where I'm putting my effort, building my own small business while sharing what I've learned to help other small businesses.  The biggest thing holding back our economy, in my opinion, is the mindset that kids (and adults who've lost jobs) need to learn to "find a good job."  Half of the jobs may be gone by the time today's infants hit working age.  Kids, and all the older people left behind for one reason or another, need to find meaningful work, much of which will not be traditional jobs in the future.

Where "W.P.O.S." came from

In 1999, I was making decent money as a lighting technician in North Hollywood, California. I lived in Huntington Beach, a near 50 mile commute, which sucked, but I liked my job, and I liked the pay.  But I got sidelined by an injury, and could do the heavy lifting the job required anymore.  I decided to try taxi driving, something I could do right in Huntington Beach, and something I thought I could make good money at.  It took a few months to learn the business, partly because taxi driving is a business, not a paycheck job.  I had one good year where I could work weekends, have 4 days off, and pay my bills.  Not the best job ever, but it was fun at times.  

I was a taxi driver in the H.B. area for most of the early 2000's, but didn't realize how technology would change the game.  Long story short, I had to start working 7 days a week, to pay my taxi lease and gas, as more and more taxis were put on the road.  Computer dispatching, a new technology, completely changed the game, like so many other industries.  I worked more and more hours, up to 100 hours a week, and was living in my taxi for years.  It stopped being fun, but if I quit, I lost my "job," my vehicle, and my "home."  Because of that, I couldn't find another way to make a living.  

It finally got so bad I had to just drop off the tax one day, and I became fully homeless with no income at all.  After a year on the streets of Southern California, I took my family's offer of a plane ticket to North Carolina.  My parents, my sister, and I grew up in Ohio, and moved across country, winding up in California when I had just graduated, and my little sister was in high school.  I got a job in SoCal, why they were in the Bay Area.  My dad got a job in North Carolina, and my sister later followed, and finished up college there.  

In November 2008, as the economy was collapsing into the Great Recession, they paid for me to fly to the Piedmont Triad area, in central North Carolina.  I stayed in my parents spare bedroom of their tiny apartment. I couldn't find any job, and lost everything I owned except for a couple changes of clothes.  I got real depressed, but I had their desktop computer in my room.  I'd never had a computer with an internet connection up to that point, I was pretty much a Luddite.  

So after spending a week looking up porn and a few other things that seemed interesting, I started blogging about my days in the BMX industry in the 1980's.  About a month into that,  few old friends found my blog, and told me to keep it up.  So I wound up writing hundreds of blog posts about weird little moments in the BMX freestyle world, as that sport was just getting off the ground.  

One day, years later, a friend and I were messaging on Facebook, and he said that with all my old school BMX posts, I was kind of like an oldies radio station, but for BMX.  My little stories were like the classic oldies that reminded other old schoolers of their teens and 20's.  I joked back, "Yeah, I'm WPOS radio, We Play Old Shit."  We got a laugh out of it, and I didn't think much of it.  But the WPOS stuck in my head, and became the title for this blog.  So that's the official story of where "WPOS" comes from.