fireworks

Starting a business is not for the faint of heart.

According to the Small Business Administration, only about half of all new businesses will survive for five years. For those who do stick it out, dreams of getting rich quickly will be supplanted by the reality that sweat equity doesn’t translate to billions of dollars overnight. In fact, one study of 158,000 startups found that those businesses that did survive experienced plenty of growing pains as they became established.