Business Opportunities Weblog

June 14, 2007 by Rich Whittle | 1 Comment

Smart Money:

A growing number of baby boomers — those 78 million Americans born between 1946 and 1964 — are retiring from corporate jobs and starting small businesses. But many are finding that the demands of entrepreneurship don’t exactly mesh with the “golden years” of retirement.

“Owning a business is like getting married: The level of commitment is extraordinary, the amount of pressure is high — and it’s unrelenting,” says Ken Siegel, a workplace psychologist in Los Angeles. For older entrepreneurs, “your body is less resilient,” he says. “The tolerance for distress is less — and you’ve got to face it, being in business is stressful.”

Running the show is also time-consuming, leaving little time for travel or leisure activities traditionally associated with retirement. Like many young retirees, Greg Wessling, 55, left a successful 33-year career as an executive at Lowe’s Cos. in 2005 and decided to start a small-business-consulting practice as a way to “to keep myself busy a few days a week.” Financially secure, with his kids through school, Wessling decided he and his wife could just “goof off” the balance of the time.

About one in three of the nation’s 5.6 million self-employed workers aged 50 and older made the transition to self-employment after age 50, according to a 2004 study by the AARP Public Policy Institute. Many retirees “want to do something they loved all their life, but they couldn’t do because they were paying a mortgage or putting the kids in school,” says Margaret Wilesmith, a counselor for SCORE, an affiliate of the Small Business Administration, who often advises aspiring-but-aging entrepreneurs in West Palm Beach, Fla. Many relish being free from the “yoke of a corporation” and are eager to find more fulfilling work, she says.

Yet, too many times retirees “are unrealistic about running their own business,” she says. While there is “tremendous psychological and emotional freedom” to opening your own shop, there’s also “no bigger prison,” says Wilesmith, who runs her own advertising firm. She often advises retirees — especially those with little knowledge or experience of the industry they’re passionate about — to get a job in that industry first. For instance, a corporate retiree who longs to open his own restaurant should work in one first. “The rules are not any different,” she says.

Photo by MSDesigns.

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Tags: Baby Boomers, Operations, Stress