Baby Boomer - Do You Have The Disposition To Be An Entrepreneur?

Baby Boomer - Do You Have The Disposition To Be An Entrepreneur?

My dictionary says "tendency or inclination"...perhaps a natural inclination. I wonder if you and I have a disposition toward being a baby boomer entrepreneur.

The world around us is changing

As we face the issues of retirement, many of the choices we made earlier in your lives may not support the reality we face today. Does the fact that we worked for someone in earlier times of our life keep us from adopting the solution that may work better as we face new times in our life?

Does our disposition about financing our living need to change too?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqjJGTwK13U

Many baby boomers are retiring at the end of the era of defined pension plans. They have established pensions that will meet their income needs and insurance plans that cover their health needs. May others have saved enough to cover these two big fears of baby boomers: 1) having enough money to cover their living expenses and 2) having a way to meet their healthcare needs.

The next tier of baby boomers face these same two problems and hope to cover them with an encore career. This might come in the form of working longer before retiring, working either full or part time. It might include becoming an encore entrepreneur in a more traditional business where they provide products or services that depend upon their personal efforts to meet the needs of their customers.

The third tier of baby boomers look to approach the problem differently. They look to create an income generating asset that will not ultimately depend upon them being able to be healthy to work to produce income. The asset will be able to provide for their needs. This is more typically another form of baby boomer entrepreneurship. This is creating a business that does not depend upon you to run the day to day operations. This may well be your best solution if you don't already have a defined pension plan or have not saved enough assets to cover your retirement.

This third tier depends upon developing a business where you work smarter rather than harder. You create a business as an organization apart from you that meets both your needs and the needs of the organization. The needs of the organization are basically the needs of your employees and the needs of your customers.

Many people believe this this is not possible, however we see examples of this around us every day. The most common example is that of the fast food franchise. Franchise owners do not set out planning to work behind the counter all their lives. They develop systems to run the business and hire managers to run the systems. That is how we hear about people who own hundreds of stores. Secondly, the asset they own can be sold to someone else to fund their future needs.

A second example is the corporation for which you may have been working for years. Do the shareholders, the owners of that corporation, show up to work everyday? Generally, the answer is "no". People are hired to produce the results that are defined by the shareholders.

Do you have the disposition to be that special type baby boomer entrepreneur?

Is your disposition fixed? Do we have the opportunity to change our disposition to become something we have never considered before? Can you reinvent yourself or is it too late?

This video is a Minute With Maxwell. In it, legendary personal coach John Maxwell shares his thinking about our dispositions. I think that if you watch it you will hear him tell you that you can change your disposition. Not only can you put on an entrepreneurial mindset, you can put on a mindset that will allow you to accomplish far more than you think you can accomplish as you read this post. I believe the answer is yes, you can. 

What's  the next step?

Watch the short video by John Maxwell and decide about your disposition. If your disposition is to begin shaping your entrepreneurial mindset, join our mailing list. My Baby Boomer Business Dream.

Brought to you by Shallie Bey, Founder - Smarter Small Business Blog
 ~ The Business Dream Weaver

Why Your Baby Boomer Business Needs To Be "You Proof" (Encore Careers)

http://stories.dlvr.it/story/175196

Why Your Baby Boomer Business Needs To Be "You Proof" (Encore Careers)

As baby boomers one of our biggest fears as we face retirement is whether we will out live the money we have for retirement. That is a question for everyone, regardless of how much we have been able to save.

The Solution to the biggest fear of baby boomers facing retirement

As a boomer considering retirement, one of the best suggestions for us is to find ways to continue to generate income during retirement. That advice commonly comes in three forms:

• Delay retirement so that the money you have saved can continue to grow.
• Create an encore career that allows you to continue to work but in a way that gives you more flexibility to enjoy a form of "semi-retirement".
• Create a special form of encore career where you start a business that will allow you to continue to earn an income in retirement. This is often called becoming an encore entrepreneur or an "encorepreneur".

The Solution to the second biggest fear of baby boomers facing retirement

With all of these options, the big problem is that they don't directly address the second big fear of baby boomers facing retirement. That is whether their health will deteriorate or consume their savings in a faster then normal rate.

Of course, we can do all the things that increase the odds that we will continue to be healthy. We can eat well, exercise, and manage our stress. Yet there is not guarantee we will be successful. So the next challenge is to find a way to continue to have income even if our health deteriorates.

The best answer to that comes from becoming an encore entrepreneur in a specifically defined way to be able to have your business run whether you are in good health or not.

The task is to build a business where you own it but it does not depend upon you having to do the work for it to operate day by day. This is beyond the concept of being an absentee owner. It is more about having systems in place to do the business and a team to manage the systems. Ultimately, your job is to train and develop the team.

This may sound like a dream. Yet this happens in reality. There is already documented evidence that businesses designed around this concept sell better than businesses that depend upon the owner being constantly present to operate the business. You probably don't think about this, but you come in contact with this daily. The most common and visible place is in dealing with franchised businesses.

My favorite example is a McDonald's restaurant. When have you ever gone into a McDonald's and depended upon knowing who the owner is to make sure you get your order? Have you ever seen an owner in a McDonald's? You don't really know...do you?

So how is this possible? They have systems that define the work and a management team to oversee the systems. The result is that teens do the daily work to generate multi-million dollar businesses, not only in your neighborhood, but in "identical" businesses around the world. These are teens wearing clean uniforms, smiling at senior citizens, and keeping the place so clean that it will pass most any health test. Is this your mental image of the average teenager?

How can you create a systems designed business for your encore business?

The first step is decide that this is really possible. One way to convince yourself is to read the work of Barry Neighbors and what he calls the "hit by a bus test". Follow the link in this post to his great article called Is Your Company "You Proof"? Can it Survive the "hit by a bus" test? He advocates making your company sellable by improving your systems. He lists why companies that pass the test get higher valuations from prospective owners. It is only a small step to realizing why such a business is of higher value to you as a baby boomer in retirement.

If you want more tips on how to develop your entrepreneurial mindset, join our mailing list. My Baby Boomer Business Dream.

Brought to you by Shallie Bey, Founder - Smarter Small Business Blog

~ The Business Dream Weaver

Can Owning A Business Help Your End Of Life Experience? (Encore Career)

Can Owning A Business Help You Prepare For A Good End Of Life? (Encore Career)

Do you have a plan for how you would like to live to the end of your life?

Baby boomers have many concerns about their future as they approach retirement age. Most of those concerns can be summed up in three questions:

1. Will I run out of money?
2. Can I maintain my quality of living?
3. Can I maintain good health?

The challenge is that one unasked question must be answered to know the answers to the other three questions: How long will I live?

So the reality is that we can do things that increase the probability that our answer will be "yes" or "no" to the first three questions, but it is not a certainty.

Some people try to resolve the money and lifestyle questions by saving a lot of their earnings. Sometimes that works...if you have good capital markets and wise investment choices.

Some people delay their retirement by continuing to work as long as they can. Sometimes that works...if your employer is prosperous and does not force you to retire.

Some people take on new jobs...commonly called encore careers, to reduce the amount of time they have to depend upon savings to fund their retirements. Unfortunately, health seems to force many to retire sooner than they expected.

So, is there anything we can do to increase our odds of success? Yes, the indications are that a special form of encore career may well be the answer. You can become a business owner as an encore career.

How can becoming a business owner help you solve your retirement fears?

The answer is that owning a business gives you two things that are not always present in having a job.

First, the business gives you an asset that can earn and grow that does not have to depend upon you doing the work.

Secondly, the business gives you leverage. It can give you a bigger return than what you can accomplish by just working alone. The leverage can come from having employees, business systems, or a combination of those.

In our featured video Judy MacDonald Johnston gives us a case study. She helped ranchers, Jim and Shirley Modini plan for the end years of their lives. She manage assets for them as their caregiver and health advocate. She managed the people needed to provide daily care and to run the business of the Modinis. 

Click here to see the video: http://www.ted.com/talks/judy_macdonald_johnston_prepare_for_a_good_end_of_life.html

Granted, the Modinis had a good head start. But the principle is still true at any age. The challenge is to begin building the asset, your business.

What is your next step?

Building your business requires having a vision, just as the Modinis had a vision for their lives and for their wildlife preserve beyond their lives. You can build that vision by understanding the basics of business development. Business development is the process of consciously starting and intentionally growing a business.

Business development is more about developing an entrepreneurial mindset than about being an expert in the details of business. It is about being able to pay attention in a way to spot business opportunities. Next, after spotting the opportunity, it is about learning how to take action to make the opportunity a reality.

By understanding the process of developing an entrepreneurial mindset and acting through that mindset, you greatly reduce the risk of failure that is the experience of so many people who start businesses without a plan.

If you would like more information on developing that entrepreneurial mindset, please sign up to be on our Smarter Small Business Blog mailing list. We will share with you more information on the resources that will help you build your entrepreneurial mindset in a smarter way. Just click this link: http://mybabyboomerbusinessdream.weebly.com/
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Brought to you by Shallie Bey -- The Business Dream Weaver