Faced with an unemployment rate of 16 percent for 20- to 24-year-olds, a growing number of recent college and grad-school graduates are launching their own companies, according to anecdotal evidence from colleges, universities and entrepreneurship programs around the U.S.

I love it. When certain people can’t find jobs in this job market, they don’t go and run to the government for help nor do they cry poverty and complain about not being able to make ends meet before it is too late. Instead, they open up their own companies and give entrepreneurship a try. Outstanding!

This push toward entrepreneurship among young people is likely to continue as employers plan to hire 7 percent fewer graduates from the class of 2010 than they hired from the class of 2009, which saw a nearly 22 percent drop in hiring from the class before, according to a recent report from National Association of Colleges and Employers.

The job market really is a mess out there. Thankfully, I’m in a job that I believe is pretty secure and I’m holding a position that I believe is essential to my company’s short and long term success. I’m also thankful that I worked diligently in the last few years to receive a great education and to establish additional streams of revenue outside of the paycheck that I receive from my day job. Sure, it means that I work late some nights when the college semester is in session and it means that other times when I’d rather be relaxing (i.e. when I’d rather be lazy), that I have to grade papers or sign in to an online teaching environment, but that’s okay with me.

Much like the people that the article above talks about, I’ve taken a no bullshit stance towards making sure that my future is secure. I hope that 2010 proves to be as good for me as 2009 was in terms of working my plan for financial freedom and professional success! You’ve got to go out there and make things happen!

I was sitting at my desk reviewing my personal finances (which is a nightly ritual for me) and I was thinking about how I used to use both Microsoft Money and Intuit’s Quicken software. These days I don’t use anything besides some spreadsheets that I created and, frankly, they work great! But as I was going over my finances I started to think about the old Mint.com account that I opened up about a year ago before shutting it down.

Some months ago I remembered hearing that Mint.com was purchased by Intuit, which I thought was a real shame since Mint.com had a great user interface and was very user-friendly. Intuit doesn’t have the best record on either of those issues. Anyway, as I was thinking about this stuff I pulled up the New York Times website and wouldn’t you know that there was an interview with the creator of Mint.com (who is now a Vice President at Intuit) right there on the front page? It was a good interview, too! For example, I found out things like this…

Q. Are there parts of corporate culture that you find strange?

A. The corporate campus seems so quiet. A start-up is overflowing with energy. Here it’s a little more subdued. They’ve got these high, very depressing cubicles.

If I wanted a new computer or had some I.T. issue at Mint, I just walked to the tech ops team and they would get me set up in a couple of minutes. At Intuit, being a big company, you call the help desk, and the help desk has been outsourced to some foreign country — I can’t place the accent. They really have no idea of where you are or what your needs are. It’s the standard phone service when you get sent to a foreign country, but this is an internal help desk. It’s a real pain. I expressed this to one of my Quicken colleagues and he said, “Yeah, we just never call the help desk. Don’t bother, here’s who you need to call to skirt around the system…” I thought, that’s sort of dumb in a bureaucratic way.

But at the same time, a big company has processes with much more rigor than what we ever had in a start-up. They have great specialization when it comes to retail, packaging, search engine marketing or affiliate programs. And the financial rigor of a big company is phenomenal in terms of projections, making sure everything is on track on a weekly basis, or reporting your numbers — they’re very, very good at that sort of thing.

I found that interesting, but I also like reading about corporate culture. The interview – linked above – is a short read and one that I think you’ll enjoy if you’re interested in the internet and technology or just how entrepreneurs are integrated into established organizations.

First, I constantly think that I’m doing myself a disservice by not moving my website company to a full time profession. With over thirty clients and the ability to have another thirty within a six month period (if I wanted them), I can certainly build myself a very respectable portfolio. The problem is that I created my company to be the anti-website company in that I don’t charge thousands and thousands of dollars for initial site designs. Those large design dollars are what sustain many small website companies. Plus, I also set up my company so that it wouldn’t gouge customers on monthly fees. Other companies charge $25 per month for hosting expenses – I charge between $5 and $7. See what I mean?

Whenever I think about pushing the website company to a full time job, I always remember that I have such drastic student loan debt that it’s not quite realistic for me to drop my full time job to pursue this entrepreneurial opportunity. Even still, though, the idea is always sitting in the back of my mind…

And next to that idea is the idea that I should start a grant writing company. I love to write (can you tell?) and I’ve been successful on each grant that I’ve ever submitted. By the way, those grants have totaled more than $1,000,000 for the companies for which I’ve written them. Not too bad, really. And the grants that I’ve successfully completed range from private foundations to large government grants.

So the second idea that constantly floats around my head is to get serious about opening up a second small business that focuses on grant writing. I think that it is a profession that I would be very good at in both the short and long term.

And finally, the third idea that is always floating around my head is to just open up a full service communications consulting firm. In this scenario, I could wrap the website company, grant writing, and a variety of other concepts into one business and offer a full suite of services to potential clients. One of my college professors put that idea in my head six or seven years ago and I haven’t been able to shake it out yet. Of all of the ideas presented above, I think that this one has the most potential to become a reality one day.

The barriers that I constantly run into when I think about the third idea are, of course, financial in nature. Again, I would need to line up at least ten or so clients and have them signed to at least one year contracts (preferably three year contracts) at a significant dollar amount in order to have the capacity to pay for everything I need to pay for in the first year of business (taxes and my salary included, of course).

I think I could do it.