Small Business Boomers

In the home where I grew up, in the kitchen by the phone, my mother placed this old German saying: “Ve Get Too Soon Oldt Und Too Late Schmart.”  After seeing it every day, I must have embedded it into my consciousness, and I think of it often.

Baby boomers have LOTS of experience, most of it gained the hard way, by trial and error.  That’s the kind way of saying that we have learned by getting our butts kicked (sorry, that’s the only way I know how to say it).  We know how to:

• Get employees to do something they don’t want to do
• Fire or lay off employees
• Deal with difficult people (employees, vendors, customers)
• Make a profit or recover from a loss
• Find new markets for products or services
• Go bankrupt and keep on going

In other words, we’ve been up and down and we know what it feels like to be in both places, in business and in life.

Now many of are reconsidering our lives and trying to figure out new ways to put our experience to work in different ways.  We laugh about having to resort to being “Wal-Mart Greeters,” much the same way as our parents joked about having to “end up in the poorhouse.”

Retirement today is not what it was in our parents’ generation.  My father retired from a 50-year job that he hated, and spent the rest of his life reading on the porch, fishing, and traveling to see his grandchildren.  We aren’t our parents.  We want new careers, new adventures.  We want to use our experience to volunteer, to work as consultants, to start new businesses.

Our society values youth and energy, and it often discounts wisdom and experience.  If we want a vigorous, productive society, we need to gather in all this wisdom and experience to help our society grow.

Baby boomers: Think creatively about what you want to do with the rest of your life.  One of my main purposes in this blog is to present you with  a variety of business and volunteer options.  There is a whole world of possibilities out there, and you can use your valuable experience to give back to society or to further expand your mind and stay young.  Later today – 5 ways to use your business experience in a new career.

The rest of you:  Think about how a baby boomer could benefit your business, by bringing his or her lifetime of experience to your venture.   One of the best ways to “get schmart”quicker is to piggyback on the experience of others who have been there.  Hire a baby boomer!

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