Not too long from now, almost every business will be a multinational. Tiny little businesses will behave big. There will be millions of ‘Global Small Businesses’.

The Global Small Business (GSB) isn't like a big global business, and neither is it like a traditional small business. As the name suggests, this is a business that typically has less than 15 people on the core team but isn't limited by geography. It can reach into cities all over the world and can easily be making millions in sales despite a relatively small headcount.

GSBs might be service providers, offer intangible products like software and information, or sell physical products that can be sent whizzing all over the globe to customers in faraway cities.

GSBs will have incredibly well-developed brands compared with traditional small businesses, making them look much bigger than they are. Their brand identity will be consistent across social media platforms, their systems will be cutting edge, they will be driven by a powerful culture that all team members connect with and they will access funding directly from their marketplace when they have a big idea they want to scale.

Supported by technology and specialist services, GSBs will be comfortable dealing with legal issues and complex accounting. They might license their valuable intellectual property to a network of local partners, they will accept several currencies (including new cryptocurrencies) and will utilise company structures and global banking facilities that only massive companies had access to in the early 2000s.

They will be built around a ‘micro-niche’. Rather than being a business for ‘health and wellness’, they will be for ‘vegetarian marathon runners’ or ‘triathlon mums’.

A GSB can function in the tiniest of niches and go miles deep with its loyal followers.

GSBs will be great with digital media. They will interact with the world through video on the web, written articles, audio podcasts, software downloads, streaming live events, slideshows, blogs, tweets and communities. They will get their stories and ideas onto the smartphone screens of people all over the world.

A GSB will revolve around the special talents of a few ‘Key Persons of Influence’. The business will outsource almost every function that is not clearly creating value and unique to the business.

Inside the team you will probably find communications experts, technical talent, project managers and product designers. These people may be geographically separated but everyone on the team will share the vision, values and passion of the business.

These GSB teams will communicate on dedicated messaging platforms, market themselves using social media, manage their operations in the cloud and be based wherever it makes sense from a tax and intellectual property protection standpoint.

The GSBs will have their top talent working from home offices and meeting in virtual environments or rented boardrooms on a weekly or monthly basis. Owing to multiple time zones, the edges of work and play will blur. Performance will be more important than hours clocked – ‘we measure results not hours’ is the new mantra for managing employees of GSBs.

GSBs will become an attractive alternative to white-collar employment. Professionals like lawyers, accountants, consultants and managers will define a micro-niche and then leave traditional employment in favour of their own GSB start-up, or join a GSB that stirs up their underlying passion.

Lifestyle and flexibility will be a huge advantage for a GSB.

Taxation will be a key challenge for GSBs. Governments are slow to change, and define themselves by physical geographical borders. Correctly structured, the owners of GSBs will pay less tax compared with their employee counterparts. Many GSB owners will travel constantly or split their time, living between two or three locations and legally avoiding income tax altogether.

Regardless of your ethical stance on taxation, until governments adapt to this global mindset they will struggle to collect taxes from small businesses of the future in the same way that they struggle to tax multinationals like Google, Facebook, Amazon and Starbucks.

Having a GSB will create an enviable lifestyle. A GSB isn't like having a traditional, local small business that prevents the owner from travelling and limits the money they can make to the local economy.

A GSB, on the contrary, expands as you travel and is only limited by the size of the micro-niche and the creativity of the team. Many GSBs will earn millions in revenue and have only a few staff (some of whom will be based in low-labour-cost countries like the Philippines, India or Thailand and will be paid highly by a GSB compared with local jobs). For this reason, many GSB owners will earn seven-figure salaries with comparative ease.

The GSB is an exciting new category of business to look out for in the decade ahead, as the barriers to entry drop for doing business across borders.

Your next side-project might be for a GSB. You might even be setting up one for yourself in the not-too-distant future.

There's a good chance, if you're reading a book like this, that I may bump into you a few years from now and you will be fully embracing the Entrepreneur Revolution, enjoying the benefits of your GSB.

You'll have the power to log into your business from your smartphone anywhere in the world. You will be able to see sales figures, workflow and financials instantly.

You will have customers all over the world. You will probably spend a lot of your time travelling around on an endless working holiday.

Your business won't sleep – you'll be open 24/7. All of this is made possible by the times we are in. The foundations have been laid for people like yourself to unfold your passion into a highly flexible and fun business that delivers a ton of value to the world.

IT'S TIME TO CHOOSE

It might seem idealistic, however, it's entirely realistic. These are the times we live in. You have the power and the choice to leave the Industrial Revolution model of employment and step into an age of empowerment and enterprise.

For the foreseeable future, the two systems will still co-exist side by side and it will be your choice which one you want to operate in.

Already I attend dinner parties with both groups of people. On one side of the table are my friends working in corporations (white-collar factories). They steer the conversation towards issues of job security and retirement. They complain that they aren't fulfilled in their work, they find it hard to move up the ladder and they aren't able to save enough money or get the time off for the holidays, retirement and lifestyle they want.

On the other side of the table are my entrepreneurial friends. They talk about their latest product launch, their new technology and the freedom it's brought them. They are in control of their destiny and feel fulfilled in life. Also, they have discovered that they can make exponentially more money in their own business than in a job, and they don't even feel the need to retire.

The Industrial Revolution model is a slowly dying animal. It's fundamentally not right for the times we live in. The entrepreneurial GSB is nimble, dynamic and rewarding. In the UK there are only 7000ish companies that have over 250 staff. These large companies currently earn 53% of all business revenue. The other 47% is earned by 5.5 million small businesses, many of which are fast figuring out how to disrupt the markets of the big businesses.

The choice is in your hands. Do you want to work in one of the big companies where you will be required to fit in, or do you want to play a leading role in a small, disruptive entrepreneurial company? Do you want to let go of the past and embrace these revolutionary times we are in, or do you want to try to do things the way they've always been done?

DISRUPT OR BE DISRUPTED

Right now, we are at a cusp in history. It's a revolutionary time.

Technology, since the year 2000, has been building and building like a giant wave. This wave has grown in size and speed thanks to something called ‘convergence’.

Convergence is when several unrelated ideas bump into each other and create massive, unpredictable results.

Digital cameras meet mobile phones and create camera phones. Camera phones meet social networking and, suddenly, news breaks on Twitter rather than on the BBC.

Touchscreens meet ultra-thin lithium batteries and iPads are born. iPads meet digital book libraries and the publishing industry radically shifts.

Google Maps bumps into precise sensor technology, packaged inside electric cars, and suddenly vehicles don't need human drivers.

Huge breakthrough technologies are all bumping into each other. Smartphones, cloud computing, voice recognition, artificial intelligence, machine learning algorithms, social influence, collaborative workspace, cheap travel, resource capacity sharing, free video conferencing, RDF chips, emerging middle-class consumers in Asia, crowdfunding, automation, robots, DNA sequencing, 3D printing, highly targeted advertising, self-checkout, intuitive user experience, cryptocurrencies, gesture recognition, open-source operating systems, multi-device ecosystems, face recognition… the list goes on and on.

Each of these ideas, on its own, has the power to shift industries; but it's bigger than that. These technologies are all bumping into each other!

In the 1990s and early 2000s we saw every home become computerised and connected. In the mid-2000s until now we've seen everyone become computerised and connected. In the next 10 years we will see everything become computerised and connected.

A great wave of change is about to seriously take off and a wedge will be driven between two classes of people.

1. Those who are surfing this wave into the Entrepreneur Revolution.
2. Those who are clinging to the Industrial Revolution and are in serious trouble, whether they know it or not.

The surfers are the ones who embrace change, are future focused and who have positioned themselves to catch the wave and have fun with it.

Those who are in trouble are unaware of what's happening, clinging to old ways of doing things, expecting their future to be much the same as the past or trying to force things to go back to a time they felt safer.

As dramatic as it sounds, I genuinely believe that there's now just a brief window of time for people to get on the wave or risk getting left behind.

If you're reading this book, I dare say you're at the very least curious about stepping away from the old paradigms and towards the new, and this gives you a shot at being on the surfing side of the wave. If so, let's begin to take some steps forward into the Entrepreneur Revolution.