Today is my final day editing My Small Business and strangely enough, I'm going to miss it.
When I was first asked to take the maternity-fill role on, I was reluctant to say the least. I had previously been covering arts and entertainment and was worried about being bored out of my brain for nine months. How interesting could small business reportage be? Would I have to learn the minutiae of tax law?
Turns out the answers to that are a) very interesting and b) no, because we have a tax columnist who knows everything and his name is Max Newnham.
In my first week I wrote a story about Salvio's shoes, a 135-year-old handmade ballet shoe store in Sydney closing down due to declining demand and cheap internet imports.
Ballet shoes! I could do this! Not to mention, there was a huge response to the story. Emails and phone calls from former customers, and the owners had the final hurrah they deserved.
I found small business is just about everyday people trying to make a living and employ others. They're all around us, run by humans you can actually see and talk to. Crazy.
By the end of this I can safely say entrepreneurs and artists have quite a lot in common. They're often taking huge risks for a personal vision, and trying to make something out of nothing.
For that reason I've now developed a dangerous habit of shopping at as many small businesses as I can. They say $1 spent in the local economy goes around seven times and I'm not sure if that's true but it's a pretty great excuse for consumerism.
To sum it up, here are the three main lessons I learned over the past nine months in my entrepreneurship crash course.
There is no magic sauce
Many of the more popular stories I've written have been about successful entrepreneurs. People who have managed to turn nothing into an empire or an idea into a full-time job.
The reason these stories rate well is because it seems so many still think there's some magic formula out there that unlocks business success. I fear from my few months on the role, there is no such thing.
Every successful founder I spoke to was someone with drive and vision.
They've usually done tons of research to find their niche, experimented endlessly to find the right product, message or marketing and put in more hard work than most non-small business people can imagine.
Men and women are still doing it differently
Another regular observation I made was that a large percentage of the (young) male entrepreneurs I was meeting just assumed they could take over the world.
They would say things like "we will go global in 18 months" or "we're the market leaders in this field". They were seeking fast growth and wanting to take over a sector.
Meanwhile, many of the women entrepreneurs I met were starting lifestyle businesses. Their metric for success was finding some kind of work/life balance, having control over their own lives and, if possible, hiring people.
Of course, another major challenge is that when women do seek that hyper growth they face huge issues finding capital. That's where companies such as Scale come in.
The ground is shifting
More and more people are finding the traditional workforce doesn't want them, or they don't want it.
Redundancies are common, parents of young children want flexibility.
If you can't see the trend in your day-to-day life, perhaps the numbers will speak to you – 2016 saw a 36 per cent increase in ABN registration nationally.
Sole traders, small businesses and start-ups are carving out a much bigger part of the economic pie. They deserve all the support they can get.
Bhakthi Puvanenthiran is a reporter at The Age.