A path to career success is growing outside of the traditional route of entering the workforce.
Studies, including one by the Bank of America Institute, find entrepreneurship has become one of the fastest-growing career pathways. Roughly 6.6. million American adults started a business in 2025.
Eric Parker, president of the Make StartUps Institute in downtown Augusta, reviewed the reports and believes entrepreneurship is an industry that’s hiding in plain sight. It has been a reversal over the last 40 years, which had seen a steady decline in entrepreneurship rates.
“Starting in the pandemic, we began to see a resurgence where we had five million new business starts a year,” Parker told ABD. “But as of last year, we were up to 6.6 million new business starts in America for the year, so this is really a dramatic reversal. So, we put together a policy paper to begin to make the argument that entrepreneurship is actually the fastest-growing career pathway in our country.”
America has notched distinctive shifts in economic development, from the post-Civil War boom in the railroad and steel industries, to the years after World War II as industries shifted from wartime production to consumer goods including automobiles.
This may be the next revolutionary shift.
“If you look at the big picture forces that are happening, you have AI making companies more efficient, and so as a byproduct, they are letting people go in some circumstances,” observed Parker, who is also co-founder of theClubhou.se, based in the Georgia Cyber Innovation and Training Center (GCITC). “But it’s also simultaneously made it significantly easier for an individual to do everything from code their own software to automate a marketing campaign entirely using AI agents.”
The Bank of America Institute’s report found Gen X remains the largest group of business founders. However, Gen Z is coming on strong, with a one-month application growth more than double Gen X and Millennials.
Parker is leaning into nurturing the growth of young entrepreneurs. He is partnered with the Aiken Chamber of Commerce and South Carolina Research Authority in Venture Lab Aiken. Its first cohort of entrepreneurs is working through the Summer Startup program.
Entrepreneurs in that group are adults, but Parker recently hosted the Hub for Community Development’s Youth Leadership Academy, made up of high school students. Students had the opportunity to ask questions of startup founders in metro Augusta.
“Those were fascinating because it came down to everything from how do you motivate yourself and motivate your team as a founder to are you even able to maintain a social life when you’re running a business,” Parker explained. “Entrepreneurship is something that we view as critically important for communities to succeed and to thrive, but it’s not an easy pathway, and so helping students understand the mindset that they have to have going into it was really important.”
For Parker, stepping out into becoming an entrepreneur is not in the abstract. He was able to use his career path to demonstrate it is not an “either-or” decision.
“My first path into entrepreneurship was through architecture,” he said. “I have an architecture degree, and I worked in architecture firms. I hit a ceiling in what I could do in my career, and I broke through that ceiling by starting my own firm. Within 18 months, I had quadrupled my salary, and it built the foundation for me and my life that enabled me to start a nonprofit so that I could help grow this community.”
Parker is using his platform at theClubhou.se to invite people interested in entrepreneurship to learn how to begin, the pitfalls and the advantages of striking out on your own.
“We’re offering a program called Co-Work Wednesday, where we start the day at 9:00 o’clock, with a peer roundtable so that everyone can talk to each other and learn about their business and bring their own challenges that they face,” he said. “At lunchtime, we have a lunch and learn where we bring in different speakers to talk about topics. Last month, we did financial projections.”
The pass to attend Co-Work Wednesday costs $20. The next event will be on Veterans Day, Nov. 11. Veterans and their families are invited to attend free of charge. Learn more about the program at www.theclubhou.se/
