According to this article, 36,000 people have started working for themselves in Canada this year. Are these the more positive aspects of a recession that when people are fired or forced into “early retirement” that makes them think and look for other opportunities such as starting their own business?

Here are some examples of people who thought that now is the ideal time to start their own business, many of them from their own home such as Sarah Schueller who set up Stampin’ Up

She explains that: “I do rubber stamping and scrapbooking classes either in my hostess’ homes or in my own home,” she says.  “The beauty of a business like this is that it can be exactly what you want it to be.”

“You can work very minimal part time hours and fit them in around the kids.  In this economic climate, everyone is strapped for cash or could use a little extra boost.  I found that it worked really well for me because I could fit it in around soccer games and I wasn’t committed to 40 hour work weeks.  It was flexible but yet it was profitable.”

Another very interesting article I stumbled across writes that

“In New York City, one of the few municipalities that tracks self-employment carefully, there were 807,750 self-employed workers in 2006, according to new numbers from the comptroller’s office. That’s about a fifth of the roughly 4 million nongovernment jobs that existed in the city before the current financial crisis. (These days, after all the layoffs, the proportion may be even higher.) And of the 773,000 jobs that Gotham added from 1981 to 2006, a stunning 491,000 were people working for themselves, making self-employment the biggest source of job creation in the city.”

So how did this raise in self-employment start? One reason could be the wave of outsourcing by companies to remove all the non-core businesses from their payrolls and outsource these. All this has lead to people doing translation, web design, accounting and corporate training within companies now providing the same services as independent contractors. Technology has also made it easier for anyone to not only start-up their own company but to be able to reach-out worldwide. Then there is the work-life balance issue. True working at home has its advantages: start to work whenever you want to, no commute, ability to see your children and spouse more often, and you can decide when you want to work and when not.