Americans are starting businesses in record numbers. A number of factors are at the heart of this trend, including including peoples' disillusionment with corporate life, the job-killing recession, the ease of business entry enabled by the Internet, and the entry of baby boomers (hitting retirement or layoff age) into the entrepreneurship pool.

You may be one of the new or potential entrepreneurs. If so, here are some things to think about before you launch.

To start a business, you have to be operating at 100 percent of your mental and physical capacity. After being beaten half to death by the job market, dwindling finances, tensions at home, you....start a business? Creating a business -- even one that involves only you -- is an activity that nature attacks with a vengeance. All her forces are against the success of start-ups (or else everyone would do it, right?).

You want to start a business, you got to have a couple of things:

• Mental and physical health that's as good as it can possibly be. Out of shape from hanging around the house answering ads for jobs? Depressed by the same? You are not ready to start a business!
• The understanding that you are starting a business not because no company will have you, but because it is the only thing in the world you can do -- even if you had a job offer for $1 million a year.
• The ability and willingness to work harder than you ever have in your life, for a long, long time.
• The complete support of your immediate family (woe to her who starts a business without the support of her husband or partner, and even of her children).

• A business network that is activated and large.
• At least several years of back-up saving.

If you don't have those things and more, you're taking undue risk in starting a business. If you really want a job, get some coaching that can show you how to shake up your job search and get it done.