Ivy: Well if you’re over 50 and you thought about starting your own business, we got an expert that helps baby boomers do just that. Jeff Williams is coach, author and boomer business owner himself, he’s also the CEO and founder of bizstarters.com, and has recently published his 8th workbook for entrepreneurs, The ultimate business start up guide. Welcome Jeff.
Jeff: Welcome, thank you.
Ivy: Thank you. What are the 7 characteristics of a perspective 50 plus entrepreneurs look for, you know, business that might be well suited for them?
Jeff: Well it’s a, it’s important that the 50 plus people really kinda look at this, because they have less time to recoup from a wrong selection here. And I’ve long said that it makes no sense to trade an unhappy job for an unhappy business. So, these are the seven key things. Number one, is you really need to be honest with yourself about what you really enjoy doing. Quite often in the corporate world, you got away from that, and maybe you’ve done it outside of work. But you really need to be honest with yourself, do I really enjoy doing this particular activity that my business concept would entail. Secondly, you also have to be honest about skilled are you at this. Because what the market place is paves for is superior solutions, not average solutions. So you have to be, as I say, you have to come up with a commonly understood idea done uncommonly well.
Ivy: That unique characteristic is gonna set you apart also, but that shows that you have…
Jeff: Right…
Ivy: … set you apart.
Jeff: Right, you have to be good at it. You have to be able to basically sit down and say what are the three keys to success. I know in my business as a trainer, and presenter, my three keys are, number one, I have to be able to present comfortably in front of a lot of groups. Number two, I have to be able to do research quickly to put together presentation, coz sometimes I’m given great opportunities to present, I only have two weeks or less to prepare. And number three, is you have to really be able to run a schedule successfully. I’m happy to say that in 20 years I only missed one appointment for a presentation.
Ivy: That’s huge. That’s huge. A lot of us hire assistants, or we try all those kinds of methods to try to keep track of our lives, yeah. Good for you.
Jeff: Those are my three keys.
Ivy: Okay.
Jeff: And anybody else needs to understand their three keys, and then say, okay am I really good at these? And if you’re uncertain, you know, talk to your love one and say, you know, do I seem to be really talented. Number three, is you need to understand the financial requirements. What are the start up cost and more importantly what are the operating expenses. Because the approach I like to suggest is that we’ll help you build a marketing strategy that’s gonna start to get your customers quickly, but let’s prepare for the advent that you don’t get full sales for a year. And you have to pay, say, half of your personal living expenses some other way. Well you need to recognize what that number is before you get started. And then you have to have a psychological buy end to be prepared to make that kind of investment. Now, we’re obviously dealing with people who in some cases are putting some of their retirement assets to start the business. So, we’re very cognant in the fact, they want to keep the risk down.
Ivy: Right.
Jeff: So we really do help people launches affordably as possible, but I don’t wanna see a business going down in 6 or 7 months just because they’re just way, way under capitalized. So that’s number three, to be realistic about the money. Number four, is to, excuse me, number four would be to think about, will the business use existing skills that you already have, pretty much no new training, or do you really wanna try something new. Something that you’re good at, but maybe you haven’t been as skilled in as you need to be and you need to get some training. The next one would be stamina, you, I mean, a lot of 50 plusers are in very good health, and particularly for their age and they have a lot of energy, but you may not have as much sustained stamina as you have when you’re 25 or 30. You know, I know now if I do a couple of presentations a week, I’m a little bit more tired than I used to be. I used to do 5, 6 presentations a week when I was in my 40’s, didn’t bother me. So now I need a little bit more time to recover, and I’m also not ashamed to say that I occasionally take a nap during the day so that I can, you know, push on. You need to understand what’s the stamina required by your business concept. The another area that really requires some little bit of soul searching, and that is how much technology is involved in your propose business idea. Is it your just typical knowing how to use email and knowing how to use Microsoft word, well that’s a case you probably already know that. But if it’s something such as internet marketing or a graphic design and editing or digital photography, then I would strongly recommend you go to your local community college before you launch a business and get a little, maybe 6 week brush up course. I know my wife’s done this with email, she was a little uncertain about certain aspects of emails, so she went to the senior center and took a, I think a 5 week course and she came back, you know, very confident she understood everything.
Ivy: Good. good, and that’s interesting. Because I think that it’s a steep learning curve for a lot of baby boomers that technology side of things. Some people maybe very well equip, but then, that can be daunting for others whose skill sets might be in the arts or in the services, but they don’t have a strong set in technology. You recommended going and getting some classes, but also what point does a business owners surround themselves with the best experts.
Jeff: Great idea from the start. And I’m a perfect example that I’m really a right brained person which is more into concepts and creativity, and, I mean, I can balanced my checkbook in such, but, that’s really not my strength and in fact I had to have a lot of tutoring in the financial side of business over the years. But, what I did with technology, when I launch bizstarters at age 51, I knew really nothing about what drove internet technology and I certainly didn’t understand internet marketing. So I went out and I just said to people who had really well functioning websites, I call them up, I said, hey, who did your web work for you? And a couple of them didn’t really wanna share the information, but finally I found somebody and they said so and so did it, so I call the guy up and said listen, I need some education. And even now, after almost 8 years of having a dot com company, I still spent a couple thousand dollars a year for education. And also to know that if I have any kind of computer problem, I pick up the phone, I have a, a matter of fact one of my former start up clients, a guy named Guy, who is in his 50’s also, he, that’s his business. He comes to your business and fixes what ever you have. I have a terrible problem with a virus last year, it just completely disabled my computer, and I was just beside myself. I couldn’t get in anything, including in an email, I couldn’t get in the internet. I just call Guy up, he said I think I know what it is, he came out, and took a full day, and you know, it cost me 7 or 800 dollars, and plus he had to install some new software but the problem was taken care of. And I haven’t had a problem since.
Ivy: What, do we get all 7 key elements in there?
Jeff: Yes.
Ivy: Run over those again for us.
Jeff: Well number one is something you’re really passionate about, number two is something you truly have experienced in, number three is you understand the financial requirements and you’re prepared psychologically to make that kind of investment, number five is stamina, understanding the what requires for that, the next one would be are you, are you gonna be able to run the business with all pre existing skills or are you gonna need added skill sets and last was the technology, understanding the level of technology required, whether it’s just the everyday run the mill type technology or whether you need to step up.
Ivy: Okay, Jeff, is there something skill set or assets that set 50 plus entrepreneurs apart from other entrepreneurs because of their experiences in their life?
Jeff: Oh yes, there’s a couple of things and there’s also a couple of potential weaknesses they have to be aware off as they move from the corporate world. First of all is we’re very accustomed to competition, from the earliest time I can remember, 5 or 6 years old, I remember just being kids everywhere. For example I was telling friend the other day that when we were kids back in the 50’s, if you went to the Saturday movies, you have to get there two hours early to get a sit, coz there are so many boomer kids. I mean I remember trying out for little league, you know, just thousands of kids and I even had to audition for my boy scout troop.
Ivy: Really.
Jeff: Very competitive, so a lot of the boomers, know competition. They know, kind of have to figure out what they’re real specialty is and, you know, project it out there. and the second thing is that I think a lot of the older boomers, the 50 plus boomers, they’re very organize people, they’re pretty good at organizing time. Because is was really the first generation where in many families, there are 4, 5, 6 kids and you really have to learn how to manage this whole family. I mean, I knew growing up, I don’t there was a family in my block that have more than two kids or three kids, so it really strengthens. Now, as far as the corporate experience, there’s a couple of things that really, I think prepare boomers well, one of them is their very good net workers. And particularly in today’s corporate environment, it’s such a thin management structures that’s quite often if you really need that extra insight on something, you have to go outside of the company to somebody else in your industry. Maybe in a trade show you have dinner with somebody else in another company. It’s hard to get that kind of advise inside, and there’s very little mentoring done today in the corporate world, so. Baby boomers of the last decades have really have to learn how to be good net workers. And the second thing that is really a strength I think is that boomers are very expert at some technical area. They’re very well trained in that.
Ivy: Really.
Jeff: Yes. If it’s, if there comptroller they probably know the latest financial management techniques, because that’s one thing corporations have done. They’ve, until recently, invested money pretty continuously in training. So when these people get out, they’re pretty well trained.
Ivy: So you mentioned that they’re good time management, very good at competition, what are some of the, maybe the drawbacks or weaknesses?
Jeff: There are a couple, one of them, and this is not necessarily just true to people over 50, but it’s particularly pronounce to people that are 50, and that is that they’re very use to delegating all manner of things in the corporate world, you don’t delegate when you’re a new entrepreneur. Some things, I mean for example…
Ivy: Well would you delegate them to.
Jeff: I know, your dog.
Ivy: Yeah.
Jeff: In my case, I started with my dog and my self coz my wife went out to work. So, I mean certainly you can, after about a year or so, I have a bookkeeper.
Ivy: Okay.
Jeff: Okay, you can certainly do that, but a lot of stuff you have to do yourself. And in fact that’s the really exciting part of being an entrepreneur is to learning how to do it. the second thing that I think is a potential weakness when corporate people move in to the world of entrepreneurship is they are more accustomed to having a problem already identified in the market place. So they’re brought in to do tactical things. When you’re an entrepreneur, you have to be very good that finding the idea, the problem in the market, evaluating how you’re going to solve this problem and then doing all the tactical stuff. It’s that extra piece comes before the implementation. Coz most corporate people, they’re all about implementation.
Ivy: Right.
Jeff: And that’s certainly important but to strategize thing is equally important as an entrepreneur, and that something that you really have to kinda learn when you become a new entrepreneur.
Ivy: That’s interesting, do new entrepreneurs have resources for that? You know, where big corporations might had the marketing resources or to determine what the problem was or key areas they needed. This is a much smaller scale so, you obviously know what the problem is coz it’s hitting close to home, but trying to be tactical and determine that, that implementation. Is it different then on the smaller scale?
Jeff: Well you can use some corporate techniques, for example, my clients don’t know this is what it is, but I used what’s called Boston and Consulting Quadrant.
Ivy: Okay.
Jeff: Grid, which is something they teach you in graduate business school. It’s basically a way to analyze how any company can grow into the future. And I don’t tell them it’s the Boston Grid, but I’ve adapted this. I adapt anything I can from the corporate world to the small business world, but there are some unique things. And I think probably the most unique position on this whole difference between big business, small business is probably been communicating through this books Guerilla marketing by Jay Levinson. He came out and say hey you know, small business marketing is not just a smaller size of big business marketing.
Ivy: No, no.
Jeff: It’s a different approach.
Ivy: Good point.
Jeff: He created, you know, the phrase Guerilla, which means doing a lot with a little.
Ivy: Right.
Jeff: So I think basically the one reality of being an entrepreneur is that you are, what I call asset deprivation all the time.
Ivy: Right.
Jeff: Not enough time, not enough money, not enough staff. So, it’s pushing through all of that, whereas in the corporate world there’s almost a embarrassing riches of resources sometimes.
Ivy: Well Jeff, you mentioned that you implement some of these things maybe through your website also for your clients, bizstarters.com, talk about what an entrepreneur might find on bizstarters.com.
Jeff: Well we have basically four areas of the site. We really try to make it as interactive as possible and this is one of the beauties in the internet is that unlike direct mail or television ads, people can respond immediately to something in the internet.
Ivy: Right.
Jeff: All you have to have is a small inbound email box somewhere on the site and in our case we have them on every page. Number one, we have an ezine that I published, it’s a digital news letter I publish once a month, it’s free, it’s called 50 and Beyond. And in there I do things in every issue, one, is I give out a little how to on something. For example this next month, April, is gonna be a little how to on really how to use email marketing, the second part of it is I talk about somebody’s real experienced of a 50 plus entrepreneurs, a case study thing. The second thing we have is a pretty in addition with the ezine, we have pretty rich resources area, we have quizzes, checklist, assessments. Boomers particularly like to be able to go and to do something for 3 or 4 minutes and say okay, here’s an outcome.
Ivy: I see.
Jeff: So we try to do that. The third thing is we have telegroups frequently both for fee and for free.
Ivy: Okay.
Jeff: One of our most popular workshops we charge a fee for is should I go scratch start up or franchise.
Ivy: Right.
Jeff: It’s a 16 minute workshop that I do over the phone. We used something called telebridging, which allows multiple people to be on the same phone line, on the same time with me facilitating and it can be anywhere where there’s a touch tone phone. I mean, I just tell you a very funny story very quickly, one time we were doing one of the telergroups and I noticed that there was this sound in the background, and I ask usually everybody to mute their phones so we don’t get background noise, well then the noise continued. And I ask everybody twice on the call, is somebody have background noise, finally this kind of sheepish voice chimes up and says I’m sitting in a beach in Jamaica. It was the surf coming in that we heard in the background. So anyway, that’s the story about telegroup. And the fourth thing we offer is we offer our start up guides, our work books and two years ago we launch another division called Virtual Incubator, which is a growing network of business start up coaches. They’re all over 50 years old themselves and they provide and facilitate planning and learning for the people who aren’t quite completely do it yourself. I mean we have a whole line of do it yourself products in bizstarters, including that boomer business start up guide. But for example in the middle of May in New York city, we’ll be introducing a live workshop to go with this workbook.
Ivy: How neat. Well Jeff is a first hand, and obviously you are also a boomer business owner, you started two businesses after the age of 50. What made you decide to start them and why do you choose, you know, these starters?
Jeff: Well I chose my original company 20 years ago because I love to teach. And although I never had a job in the corporate world as a teacher, I was always a sales and marketing hired gun. I did it outside, I touched sports, I’m from Washington DC, I used to teach in the inner city. I’ve taught English to non-speaking English adults, my mother was a teacher. So when I was getting into the point where I want to get out of the corporate world, I thought okay, what will I do? and teaching came to my mind. Well I spend about a year working on a business plan to figure out to how to make a living from teaching and what I realized is I knew a lot of business. And a surprising amount about small business, because even though I’ve been in the big corporate world a lot of my suppliers have been under 5 million dollars a year in sales, mom and pops. And particularly when I worked for Sears in the 70’s, in those days Sears used to get very involve in their suppliers businesses and I remember going out to a supplier in New York or north Carolina wherever and we, you know, family owned company, we have to mediate a dispute between, say, the two brothers that own the company. So I learn a lot about it, so I thought okay I wanna go in to this. And at the time the really, this was the late 80’s, we’re just starting to develop entrepreneurial courses in the United States. So that’s why I jump into it. Now, why did I started bizstarters, well around 1996, 97 after I’ve been in business for about ten years, our enrolments for our live training courses have really started to drop off. And we did some surveying, we found out, pretty uniformly, that they love the course but didn’t like having to drive to a college ten times to take a class.
Ivy: Right.
Jeff: It was just inconvenient.
Ivy: And anymore, that was not economical.
Jeff: No, you’re right. 3 dollars and 50 cents a gallon, you’re absolutely right, it’s true. So I thought to myself, being, you know, trying to be a good entrepreneur, I thought okay the product is sound it’s the delivery methods that’s the problem. And just about that time, I was actually a couple of years behind in figuring out this internet, because the earliest people were on it in 1996, this is 1998, so bizstarters was our strategy to make all that live training we did to turn into digital format and make it available nationally and internationally. And in fact we now have clients in Ireland and Netherlands and England and some other countries around the world in addition to the United States. So, bizstarters was a opportunity for us to continue the growth curve of this training products but in a new distribution medium, that’s why I started it.
Ivy: And talking, we went on to the technology world, so you took the same business idea but you just kinda modified it so that it kinda grew into the technology grew and change.
Jeff: Right.
Ivy: In the market. Well, thanks for being here with us Jeff. Jeff is not only a great councilor and adviser, he’s also a good listener, I got to talk to him quite a bit off camera, but we are gonna feature him here, he is one of our, on SBTV.com featured advisers on boomer entrepreneurs and you can find out more from Jeff right here on SBTV.com
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