Baby Boomer Entrepreneurs

Baby Boomers, the generation born between 1946 and 1964 are participating in Baby Boomer entrepreneurship at amazing levels. Though Global Entrepreneurship Week and similar efforts are focusing upon getting young people to explore entrepreneurship, it is the Baby Boomers who are answering the call at unprecedented levels.

In recognition that Americans aged 55 to 64 start small businesses at a higher rate than any other age group, the U.S. Small Business Administration has decided to focus upon making resources available to this sector. A new site, http://www.sba.gov/50plusentrepreneur offers help to explore the benefits of business ownership at this age. The site seeks to offer helpful information to make choices about business ownership.

One of the key factors driving this development is a change in the way people in this age group seem to view retirement. A recent USA Today/Gallup poll says that 63% of non-retired adults in the United States plan to work into retirement. Most interesting is that this poll was before the current economic collapse and that people were making this decision for non-financial reasons. Most were saying they made the choice for the enjoyment they get from work. Most certainly, with the impact of the drop in the financial market, this group will swell due to people having financial concerns.

One smart entrepreneurial idea may be helping Baby Boomers who want to become entrepreneurs. The SBA site includes an Experience Corps comment that the number of Americans age 55 and older will almost double between 2007 and 2030 - from 60 million to 107.6 million. That certainly sounds like a niche market opportunity.

This is not a new trend. Nearly half the country's self employed workers - 7.4 million - are so Baby Boomers according to the U.S. Department of Labor. And a recent AARP study conducted by RAND Corporation discovered that one in three self-employed workers age 51 to 69 made the transition to self-employment at or after age 50. See the SBA site for more facts. Also see our directory on Entrepreneurship for New Entrepreneurs.

Shallie Bey

Books for Entrepreneurs - The Back of the Napkin

When Dan Roam wrote The Back of the Napkin, he probably never thought he was writing a book for entrepreneurs. But that is exactly what he did. The book is about discovering ideas, developing ideas, and selling ideas. That is the entrepreneurship process. That is the way to develop entrepreneurial ideas and the foundation of the entrepreneurial mindset.

When Dan Roam wrote this book, he did have in mind presenting you with a set of visual thinking tools to help you learn how to tackle problems by looking better, seeing sharper, and imagining further. He does a marvelous job of accomplishing this task.

I have developed for my readers a Squidoo lens (Internet Directory) that takes you on a tour of the Internet on the topic of The Back of the Napkin. This site has excerpts from the book, YouTube presentations by the author and practical examples of how entrepreneurs have used this method to implement their entrepreneurial ideas. This is a great place to start if you are a young entrepreneur seeking to participate in Global Entrepreneurship Week.

Here is a quick sample of one of the videos you will find there.

Shallie Bey

Global Entrepreneurship Week Is Almost Here

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Is Global Entrepreneurship Week making you curious about how good an entrepreneur you can be? Well, the time to test yourself is coming closer and closer.

In November of 2008, during the week before Thanksgiving, the first ever Global Entrepreneurship Week will occur. It will encourage young people from around the world to explore entrepreneurship as a way of resolving many of the great challenges of the world.

In an effort to support Global Entrepreneurship Week I have scoured the Internet to collect some of the best advice on entrepreneurship that I could find. It is all organized on a Squidoo Directory to get you started.

This directory, called a lens by Squidoo, will 1) monitor the events leading up to Global Entrepreneurship Week, 2) Share insights on entrepreneurship, and 3) follow the progress once the event occurs.

Shallie Bey

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Entrepreneurship In A Word: Part 3 – Advisers

No matter how experienced you are as an entrepreneur, you depend upon growing by having good advisers. The challenge is making sure that your advisers are supporting your goals and dreams and not just selling you their own.

Joan Magretta, strategy editor of the Harvard Business Review during the 1990s and author of the delightful book, What Management Is: How It Works and Why It's Everyone's Business, has an interesting insight. She calls it “advice without context”.

She observed that the number of books and major articles on management has grown to over two thousand per year. Most of these focus upon a single idea in isolation and often out of context. But the practical reader wants ideas they can quickly use, so most literature is full of lessons learned and concrete to-do lists – the ten things you can do today to be effective or savvy.

The problem is that 10 things from each of 2000 sources suddenly turns into an overwhelming twenty thousand suggestions to you each year. This doesn’t even include the advice from friends, relatives, business consultants, customers, other successful entrepreneurs, and in today’s age the Internet. This is the problem of advice without context. Every piece of advice must be placed in the context of your personal goals and your business plan. This is the reason that you design your business plan to be your tool for designing your business. You must know not only what to do but why the advice supports your goals. So, as an entrepreneur, make sure you understand the motives of your advisers.

Entrepreneurship In A Word: Part 2 – Discipline

Entrepreneurs, regardless of what industry they are in, tend to follow similar patterns as they establish and grow their businesses. If you want to be successful faster than normal or at a greater scale than normal, you will do well to understand the patterns that lead to problems and the patterns that lead to success.

 

Discipline…control gained by obedience and training…is the key to putting the knowledge of patterns into play. After all, successful development of your business depends first upon having a good strategy and then upon good implementation.

 

Many business owners approach starting a new business as though it is an instinctive skill. They think that if they know how to cook chicken, they are fully equipped to open a chicken restaurant. It is this pattern of following your instincts, flying by the seat of your pants, that causes so many people to run into the same problems.

 

The discipline of starting a business begins with the fundamental three planning questions:

 

1. Where are you now? This is about getting oriented to your current situation. If you have never owned a business before, you have a bigger learning curve ahead of you than the person who is opening their third business. If you have vast financial resources, you face a different starting point than the person who is already in debt.
   
   
2. Where are you going? This is where you define your objective? Do you want a solo opportunity that will grant you a few hundred dollars extra income or are you looking to be at the top of the INC 500 in five years? What is it that you want to build?
   
   
3. How are you going to get there? You might think of this as the bridge that you must build to cross the chasm between where you are now and where you want to be. You might call this your strategy.
   
   

Slow down to act with discipline. Begin by answering these three questions. You are likely to accelerate your overall success.

 

No one embodies the concept of discipline more than Marines. Look at how their discipline inspires us to think of them as super humans.

 

Talk with a drill sergeant. Ask them about recruits getting off the bus on day 1 of Boot Camp. Do you think they achieve becoming…one of the few…one of the proud…flying by the seat of their pants? Are you ready to begin your training? Will you inspire the people who must do business with you… your employees, your vendors, your lenders, your customers?

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Entrepreneurship In A Word -- Identity

Entrepreneurial success begins with knowing who you ARE. Unfortunately, many of the success formulas that will be dangled before you will be based upon HAVE/DO/BE.

These advisors tell you that you must HAVE stuff to be able to DO the right things. And if you DO the right things, you will BE a success.

The true formula works exactly in reverse: BE/DO/HAVE. If you will BE who you are in a genuine way, you will DO the right things. If you DO the right things, you will HAVE genuine results.

The best advisors to entrepreneurs focus upon having you plan your life before planning your business.

Michael Gerber, famed author of The E-Myth Revisited, calls this finding your Primary Aim. He puts it this way:

"I doubt that by now you’d be surprised to find out that I don’t believe your
business to be the first order of business on your agenda.

You are.

Nor will you be surprised to hear that I don’t believe your business is your life, though it can play a significantly important role in your life.

But before you can determine what that role will be, you must ask these questions:

· What do I value most?

· What kind of life do I want?

· What do I want my life to look like?

· Who do I wish to be?

Your Primary Aim is the answer to all these questions."

Startup Nation has the same message: “Plan your life, then your business.”

See their excellent discussion of how to make this plan at:

http://www.startupnation.com/steps/55/
3751/1/1/create-life-plan.htm

Look for the download templates of the sample life plan and the template to create your own life plan.

A Symphony In Four Parts...The Art of Starting A New Business

Every business idea has to begin with a thought. That thought has to be developed. Regardless of the type business, there are certain universal principles that apply.

The 30 Day Challenge is designed to help an entrepreneur focus upon those principles to test the potential of a new idea. Ed Dale, the face of the 30 Day Challenge, shares the key concepts that he describes as a symphony. Like a symphony, it depends upon blending the right parts, in the right amount, in the right order, with the right timing.

Ed introduces the 30 Day Challenge and describes the four parts of the symphony:
1. Market Research
2. Traffic
3. Conversion
4. Product

A conservative estimate is that 95% of mistakes are made in the MARKET RESEARCH stage. This is because most people don't do the MARKET RESEARCH.

Following this universal pattern can't guarantee a success every time. The beauty is that it will help eliminate the stuff that will not work.

Whether you are doing a traditional business or an Internet business, the MARKET RESEARCH capability of the Internet opens new roads to success in starting a new business or growing an established business.

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Ed Dale's Free 30 Day Challenge In Marketing Training

The past 24 hours have been amazing to me as a lifelong learner. I have added a tremendous amount of marketing wisdom due to an absolutely free resource.

Ed Dale is a marketing leader who specializes in the Internet. He is offering his 4th 30 Day Challenge. This is a way of using Internet resources to market a business that is either online or bricks and mortar. It assumes that your total level of computer skill is to be able to open a browser and to use e-mail.

As a business coach, I spend a lot of time researching marketing issues and helping my clients. In the past 24 hours, what I have learned has at least doubled my efficiency.

Though the program began officially on August 1, you can still join. There are an amazing number of resources, particularly videos, to make it easy for you to catch up and work at your pace.

To get more information, follow this link:

http://www.ThirtyDayChallenge.com/challenge/25809

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Sir Richard Branson Knows Joe Polish…Joe Knows…

Early this week, I received a surprise gift box from Amazon.com containing a DVD and a note:

Enjoy the DVD!
Best, Joe Polish

Some advice givers say, “It’s not what you know, but who you know!”

Others say, “It’s not who you know, but who knows you!”

Still others say, “People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care”.

Regardless of which advice rings true for you, you need to know what Joe knows. Joe is one of the world’s leading advocates of relationship marketing: the concept that people like to do business with people they know, like, and trust. And Joe proves the principle by investing in relationships, often by giving gifts like the DVD about the life of a famous man that he thought I would find inspiring.

Joe is one of the kindest, most generous people that I have ever met. Over the past three years that I have known him, he has expanded my horizons significantly.

Through such generosity in the form of charitable contributions, he came to know Sir Richard Branson. Not only personally benefiting from that association, Joe has opened doors for friends and clients of his company, Piranha Marketing, to gain access to that wisdom. He even recently arranged for a group to spend a week on Necker Island, Branson’s private island, to meet and talk with Sir Richard.

If you doubt how valuable an opportunity that can be, you need to know of the book, Millionaire Upgrade, by Richard Parkes Cordock. The book is inspired by the true story of an eight-hour flight with Sir Richard Branson. It describes the principles of success that a frustrated employee learned about becoming an entrepreneur when he was upgraded on a long haul flight and finds himself sitting next to a self-made billionaire.

The book shares eight principles and a “magic ingredient” that ties the principles together. Though I won’t share the details of the “magic ingredient”, I will share one portion of it:

“Never think you can do it alone – you can’t”

That is why I am thankful that Joe knows me!

Thanks Joe!

For more information on Joe Polish and to see him interview Sir Richard Branson, go to
http://www.joepolish.com/.

EXIT STRATEGY - The Small Business Owner's Ideal Outcome

Business exit strategy…"What is that?", you might ask. It is the general direction that you want to follow that will prepare the business for you to leave when your objective is achieved. If you are like many small business owners, your strategy might be simply to provide you with income until you reach the point that you want to retire.

You might want to pursue the strategy of building an asset, that will appreciate in value, you can sell in the future. For some that sale might be through a public stock offering. For others, it might be a company that operates smoothly enough that it can function without you, making it something worth buying by a future private owner.

A third popular strategy is to create a business that will run effectively without you that you will continue to own. Many business owners are beginning to recognize the value of this strategy.

If you currently draw $100,000 per year from your business to support your lifestyle, you have a couple options. If you sell your business and invest the principle at a 10% return, you must have $1,000,000 to sustain a $100,000 a year income contribution. On the other hand, if you can design the business to require a minimum amount of your personal time and attention, you can continue to draw the $100,000 from the business for as long as you want.

Perhaps, one of the most exciting examples of the third strategy being explored in the business community today is Tim Ferriss’ discussion of the 4-Hour Workweek. He explains how he went from Working 80 hours per week to earn $40,000 per year to earning $40,000 per month working 4 hours per week. His book titled “The 4-Hour Workweek” describes his journey.

If you would like to hear Tim live, he will be interviewed by famed business marketing expert, Joe Polish. You can listen in on your phone for free:


*The 4-Hour Workweek: Secrets of Doing More with Less in a Digital World*

Date: This Wednesday, May 30
Time: 10 a.m. Pacific/1 p.m. Eastern
PHONE: 620-294-4005
PASSCODE: 0530#


Make sure you hop on the call early!
You're about to find out what a world-record holder in tango, a national champion in Chinese kickboxing, and the owner of a multi-national supplement business have in common...and how he has so darn much free time!

If you read this message after that date, you have a couple other options that I can suggest. John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing did a great podcast recorded interview dated April 23, 2007.

Or see Tim's Blog.

Doing Small Business In A Smarter Way

Small business owners face some of the toughest challenges on the planet. Like many of the top performers in various works, small business owners need executive coaches to help them polish their game.

Unfortunately, many small business owners are not aware of coaching and the value it offers. For others there is the fear that the cost of coaching will be more than they can afford. Business Rebirth is about making a place where you can get information to help you better understand coaching and get some help in a financially feasible manner.

As a small business coach, I am constantly searching for ideas that can help my clients. Business Rebirth will be a place to share some of my best findings with my virtual clients. We will discuss ideas on this blog and will flesh them out on the main web site www.businessrebirth.com. That site only has a place holder for the moment and will be constructed soon. In the mean time, share with me your questions about your biggest challenges as a small business owner. I will respond to those questions that have the widest appeal. Given time, I will also respond to you by private e-mail. You can e-mail me at shallie@businessrebirth.com.

See you soon!