I bet you thought that was the name of a microbusiness in the title of this article. Perhaps you were even intrigued enough to wonder what sorts of products or services might be offered by such a cleverly named business.

Sorry, but this is not going to be that sort of story.

Cynthia Lockrow, MSSW, is another neighbor and good friend of mine here in upstate New York. She is a social worker, currently dealing with patient intake for Catskill Area Hospice and Palliative Care. But, like a lot of other Americans, she has a dream of starting her own business someday.

Her idea is intriguing. She wants to start an elder care network — an outfit that would coordinate the various geriatric services available from the federal government, the state and the county, along with private services where the patient can afford them, in order to support elderly people who want to remain in their own homes.

It is a business idea that makes a lot of sense for the area. This county, she tells me, has the second highest per capita percentage of people over 65 in the state of New York. And certainly, many of the local businesses here have elected to target older residents, in addition to aging Baby Boomers, rather than the rapidly dwindling 18-30 population.

But Cindy is hesitant about launching her idea. Right now, there are a lot of things that get in her way.

To begin with, she is a single parent with two relatively young children, aged five and twelve. She is concerned about what will become of them if she were to leave her job, with its steady paycheck and its employer-provided health insurance. Even if she were to start the business on a part-time basis, she knows that would eat into the hours she has available for her kids. She worries about that.

In fact, she told me that it would feel like she has taken a step backwards. Cindy has a bit of a history; hers has been a long and difficult road to getting her education and building a comfortable lifestyle for herself and her young family. She fears that leaving her current job to start a business would destroy what she has worked so hard to create.

That’s another thing about that steady paycheck, by the way. On the road to rebuilding her life, she has amassed about $100,000 in student loans. She needs the paycheck to make the payments on those loans and, she says, she cannot get a deferment if she quits to start a business.

She says she doesn’t really have the time to pursue her idea because all she has available is nights and weekends. In fact, that is also why she hasn’t been able to pursue business management education from SBA-affiliated resources like the area Small Business Development Center. Their workshops and classes are held in the middle of the day and she isn’t prepared to take time off work to attend them.

She even worries about losing the level of professional respect she has earned if she were to go into business for herself. She has enough of her professional ego invested in her current employment that she doesn’t perceive starting her own business as taking a step in the direction of leadership.

Truth to tell, Cindy has so very many reasons for not pursing her business idea that you start to wonder, when you talk to her, whether she really wants to do it at all. And when you ask her about that, you learn that (contrary to what the textbooks and the economists say) Cindy feels that she will be ready to start her firm when she is in a position where she doesn’t need the money.

If she were actually to go ahead and take the plunge, she would join the ranks of what is now being referred to as social entrepreneurs. The most important thing to her is to make life better for the elderly residents in her community. From a practical point of view, she would need to make a living at it, of course. But, in spite of a clear gap in the local marketplace, making money is not her motivation.

Her business idea came about because she saw something lacking in her community and she wants to fix it. Her professional training and experience have given her a certain skill set that would provide the tools to do it. She doesn’t want to have to worry about money.

What is interesting is that, objectively, there is a very good chance that she could launch this business and, assuming it was well-managed, she could make quite a lot of money at it. And, certainly, the community needs it.

What Cindy lacks is a safety net.

One of the biggest obstacles to budding entrepreneurship in these United States is the fact that, while you are building your business to the point that it can support you, you still need money to live on.

If you are fortunate enough to have a supportive spouse, or a family that has enough money sitting around to lend you some of it, or pristine enough credit to get a couple dozen credit cards to live on to keep yourself going, perhaps you can get yourself up and running from day one.

If you have the sort of business that you can do on a part time basis, at night or on the weekend, you can get started without having to quit your day job, the way Silver Top Graphics and Future Filing did.

If you have obligations and responsibilities, and no one to share them with, there is no support for the budding entrepreneur. All of our social supports — from health care to unemployment insurance — are tied to having a job working for somebody else.

You have to wonder how many communities have lost out on critical, or needed, or just nifty new businesses because people are understandably afraid of flying without a net.

You also have to wonder what has to happen before policy makers notice that our safety nets are structured to also be an albatross around the entrepreneurial neck. Or if, once they notice, they will do anything about it.