Becoming an Entrepreneur

No, You Don't Have to Be the Next Marc Zuckerberg

More than 50 percent of small business owners are over 50, documents SCORE, the volunteer organization which guides professionals in all aspects of business.

Most of those enterprises are small, that is the founders have no vision of being the next Marc Zuckerberg. However, 64 percent indicate they plan to expand in the near future. That is, unlike too many current corporations, they are in a growth mode.

Many entail leveraging a part or parts of the expertise which used to be your career. For instance, the former sales professional for Big Pharma creates a boutique training sales tactics. The former public relations agency generalist vice president hones in on the need for putting together special events.

The drivers for opting out of being an employee to being an owner include:

Future of white collar jobs in play. Mergers, flattening of organizations, restructuring, RIFs and implementation of AI are all eliminating, at least temporarily, knowledge worker positions.

Some speculate overall those jobs are not coming back. At least not in the numbers of positions which had been standard. Those include management consulting, public relations, content-creation, human resources, entertainment, old tech and more. Actually, as I explain in an article published in O’Dwyer’s Public Relations, the job you have today will remain in play, probably for a long time. That could be the new future of work.

Ageism. Well-known is the research of Pro Publica. It found two grim developments. One, if you are 50 or older the majority of you will be forced out of your organization. And, two, if you are fortunate enough to land another job in your field only 10 percent of you will be receiving comparable compensation.

After all, a major reason for pushing you out is the level of your compensation. Employers can parachute in the younger generations for much less than they had been paying you. Also, the focus is getting a particular job done. All your extensive expertise might not be required for that. So, why pay you premium wages for knowledge/skills not being applied!

The resentment over lower compensation as an employee can be the breeding ground for manifesting the entrepreneurship path.

Pandemic. The number of applications for small business soared in July 2020, tracked Forbes. There were layoffs, delayed hiring and even rescinded job offers. Necessity is the mother of invention. Also, given the upheaval in what had been normal, there was the mindset of an opening to spot opportunity. That was primarily in business services, food/restaurants, retail, health and fitness and automobiles.

Keeping it simple. The media presents sagas of founders who go for the big time, ranging from the scope of the service/product to the funding. However, the usual is the simplest approach. In addition to small, simple is the respected model of being a solo entrepreneur.

One-third of founders want to maintain complete control. So, they don’t take on partners. Professional anonymous network Reddit chronicles solo flyers making $250 an hour through consulting.

Plenty of precedents. It had been the middle-aged middle managers purged from Corporate America during the late 1980s downsizings who blazed the way for future entrepreneurs. We Boomers had nowhere to go.

Very quickly we picked up on how to operate a business on-the-cheap. For example, essentially, we institutionalized the home office, without apology. The new Staples concept of office supplies for small business provided hands-on guidance in purchasing equipment like shredding machines/PCs/printers and branding such as what kind of paper/color to use for snail-mail marketing. For training in actual selling, we enrolled in Dale Carnegie seminars.

Yes, Boomers in the late 1980s showcased that you can make a good living without having to be an employee. Obviously, that was persuasive. The rate of small startups has been growing since then.

Redefining “risk.” Many of us Boomers recall our risk-averse parents who had weathered The Great Depression. Hammered into us was to pull out all stops to get a job and twist ourselves into a submissive-employee persona pretzel to hold onto that one job.

The new normal of a volatile global economy, how technology is changing demand and dog-maul-dog competition has made not taking a risk in how we earn a living an unacceptable risk.

Even in the once-staid legal sector, upstart Kirkland & Ellis made its way into being the most profitable law firm in the world by smashing traditional models. When I coached its former employees, I noticed they too were embedded with a zest for going out of the box.

Now other law firms such as Paul Weiss have mutated into operating on a high wire. That disruption includes investing unprecedented amounts of compensation to recruit star talent. Will that have the expected ROI? Time will tell. Meanwhile, not stirring up disruption is likely to classify you as irrelevant. Being labeled “stuck” is the current branding kiss of death.

But the issue is whether entrepreneurship is a fit for you in how to earn a good living. Most of my coaching clients experiment with that option while they still have other sources of income, be they the day job and/or side gigs. That side gig could evolve into the enterprise. The old adage still holds: Stick with what you know.