Pandemic inspires entrepreneurial spree
Fran Pastore did not need to learn the official government figures released this week to know that Connecticut has become a hotbed of entrepreneurship during the pandemic, driven by need as workers lose jobs or otherwise choose to leave them to focus on needs on the home front.
With roughly 4,000 people inquiring on assistance available from Pastore’s Women’s Business Development Council since the start of the pandemic — four times the normal level — she is living the trend. As pandemic job- market realities hit home for Americans in the summer months, entrepreneurship surged according to a new tally of business applications released Wednesday by the U. S. Census Bureau.
More than 1.5 million people filed applications to start businesses between July and September, the Census Bureau determined. That was a 77 percent increase from the previous three months, which had likewise represented a record numbers of applications — but only just barely, over the fourth quarter of last year.
The entrepreneurial burst carried over into Connecticut, with the Census Bureau counting more than 12,900 filings for new businesses, about 5,300 more than in the second quarter for a 70 percent increase.
“We are seeing an increase in startups — no question,” Pastore said Friday. “Women are ... A, losing their jobs; or B, fleeing because they simply cannot tolerate the juggling of the pandemic, having the children at home, taking care of elderly parents [ while] doing the job.”
The latter trend includes people from higher- earning professions, Pastore added, but the interest in starting a business spans job categories.
The Connecticut Secretary of State’s office counted a smaller tally than the Census Bureau, but arrived likewise at record totals nevertheless. Just over 11,500 new businesses filed papers with the state in the third quarter of 2020, a 37 percent increase over the preceding three months.
‘ A little bit of desperation’
If inspiration and perspiration are the mothers of entrepreneurship, as the saying goes, recessionary desperation is the granny of them all. Connecticut’s two previous record quarterly gains in new businesses occurred in 2012 and 1994 on the heels of economic swoons induced and exacerbated by collapsing mortgage markets.
This time around, workers who find themselves on the outside looking in appear to be quicker to get the ball rolling on their own enterprise rather than wait out a return to normalcy in the job market and traditional workplace settings.
Like WBDC, multiple SCORE chapters in Connecticut run workshops and one- on- one coaching in starting up a business, as the case with chambers of commerce; entities like the