Baby boomer business owners are on the rise. In fact, they’re the fastest-growing group of entrepreneurs in the country. From 2007 to 2008, the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation found that businesses launched by 55- to 64-year-olds grew 16 percent, or about 10,000 new businesses a month, said MSNBC.com.

The Kauffman Foundation predicts that trend will continue as the workforce ages and with an employment landscape that may have changed permanently. As traditional full-time employment opportunities shrink and people needing to earn income later in life, more boomers will get pushed in entrepreneurship, say experts.

Older entrepreneurs bring decades worth of career experience, knowledge and industry contracts, and often some savings to fund a startup. But time isn’t necessarily on their side – older entrepreneurs can’t wait years for a business to turn a profit, and if they fail, they don’t have time to earn that money back, says Edward Rogoff, author of “The Second Chance Revolution: Becoming Your Own Boss After 50.”

Some boomer entrepreneurs say they opened a business based on a hobby or passion they always had but didn’t have the time to pursue.

John Olson, 45, carved table-top fountains as a hobby, but after taking an early retirement, he turned his hobby into a $2 million business. He only wished he started sooner. “I thought you had to be some kind of Harvard Business School graduate,” Olson told MSNBC.com. “But I realized you just have to apply basic business principles.”

Just when it seems like the bad news couldn’t get much worse, tales of economic success amid financial chaos are thankfully bubbling up.

And it’s in the form of successful entrepreneurship, everything from shoestring-budget start-ups to major viral marketing coups by tiny companies.

Recession be damned, some entrepreneurs are not only doing well, they are doing exceptionally well, wrote Jill Priluck of MSNBC’s “The Big Money” on March 17.

“With less overhead, a slim-to-none bureaucracy, and a philosophy that goes against even the most innovative Fortune 500 game plan, little guys in industries such as finance, marketing, entertainment, and media are busy, some more than ever, and a few are moving into territory where the big fish can’t swim. Whether making deals, planning ad campaigns, or signing talent, all small fish have the same slogan: lighter, cheaper, faster,” she wrote. “Welcome to the Little-Guy Economy, where boutique investment banks make deals while big finance is frozen, where Web geeks field calls from big media and corporate clients who need viral video and other digital-branding tools, where small law firms prosper and laid-off lawyers open their own shops, where independent music labels innovate faster, and where the word “team” can have a whole new meaning.”

Finance is perhaps the most interesting example, where small firms are playing a strong hand, particularly in the credit markets, where huge loans are history.

“While firms like Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase depend on freely flowing credit markets, boutique firms, which do smaller deals, rely more on private equity sponsors—and don’t have the same bank, credit, or securitization obligations,” Priluck wrote.

If small is in, then it doesn’t take long for some bigger fish to swim over and take a look.

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg — as big a billionaire as there is — is now looking to spearhead small business and entrepreneurship in the financial services sector, Priluck wrote.

Video producers Lindsey Johnson and Leo Borovskiy of Lush Life Productions know how it is to make it big when your administrative assistant is your voice mailbox.

They turned a viral marketing jackpot and YouTube sensation “The Chad” into a thriving business that today includes clients like Hearst Digital, Priluck wrote.

“We’ve gone from only working for advertising agencies and marketing companies to having corporations directly approach us with their brands and ask, ‘What can you do and how much can you do it for?” Johnson told Priluck.