MBA1251 Is It Too Late to Start a Business After 50?

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Hey O welcome to the $100 MBA Show. Daily Business lessons you can count on every day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the $100 MBA, a complete business training and community online. And in today's lesson you will learn Is it Too Late to Start a business after 50? Many of our listeners are considering a shift to entrepreneurship after a long career in their profession and many ask themselves, is it too late? Is it too late to start a business past the age of 50? You hear about all these young 20 year olds and college students starting startups and building amazing companies. But there's very few stories that we hear about entrepreneurs that are doing well even if they just got started past the age of 50. And today I'll be answering this question and spoiler alert, the answer is a resounding yes. There's actually a lot of advantages of starting a business for the first time when you have 50 years or more under your belt. But you will have a few challenges. Some things you're gonna have to look out for. And that's what I wanna kind of point out to you in today's lesson. So so even if you're not 50 or 40 or 35. You'll get something out of today's episode for sure. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. I want to start off this lesson by saying 50 is actually not that old. I say this because I'm nearly 10 years away from 50 and hopefully if you take care of your health, you still have a long way to go, especially with today's modern medicine and prevention remedies that we can really help have a long and healthy life. I say this because you have plenty of time. And I feel like some people, when they're thinking about starting a business and they're a bit older, they feel like I don't have enough time to make it a success. It's too late for me. I've already spent a lot of my time or most of my time in my life doing something else. And this falls into the sunk cost fallacy, which means you are obsessing over all the investment you made in the past in something other than starting a business. You say to yourself, hey, I've been a teacher for 30 years, or I was a police officer for 25 years. This is what I know, this is what I've invested all my years in. If I let that go and transition into entrepreneurship, all that time will be a waste of time and I would have to start all over. And the mere thought of that for a lot of people is exhausting. Well, I'm here to say that I made a transition like that. You know, I wasn't a full time entrepreneur all my life. I transitioned to full time entrepreneurship in 2012.

I.

But before that, for 13 years, I was an educator. I was a teacher and head of department at a university. I built businesses on the side as a side hustle for a while, for 10 years actually. So I had to make a choice. I had to leave behind a career and say, that's over now and I'm starting something new. But the funny thing is, is that you're not actually starting something totally new. All that experience that you've had, whether you were a police officer or a doctor or lawyer or, or any profession, it's experience. It's experience that you can transfer into your new life as an entrepreneur. If you've been doing a career or been working in the workforce for 25 years, you have a ton of experience dealing with conflict, dealing with, you know, difficult people, disgruntled customers, managing other people, team leading, all that kind of stuff you're gonna need as an entrepreneur that young people don't have. College graduates don't know anything. They don't know how to do anything really. So when they start a business, they're shooting in the dark. They're learning by trial and error. It's a lot harder for them. They don't have any frames of reference. Most of them have never even had a job in a company. So they don't even know what a good, well oiled machine looks like, what it looks like to work at a good company. They don't have a model. You, on the other hand, have tons of experience in this.

You know exactly what works and what.

Doesn'T, you know what you like and don't. And you've built good habits over the years. You learned how to focus, you learned how to work hard, you learned how to, to sacrifice at work. And all these things you're going to need as an entrepreneur, you're going to be more equipped, you're going to be more prepared than somebody who doesn't have all that experience. Starting a new challenge, like becoming an entrepreneur is exciting. I remember when I made the transition, I was so excited. There's a sweetness to it that I miss. Everything's new, everything's fresh, everything's exciting. And even though it was so hard, I enjoyed every day. I still do. But those first few years in entrepreneurship, that full time entrepreneurship where I was, you know, relying on my business to be able to pay my bills, there's something really fun about learning all over again, learning things anew, learning things that are fresh. Now a lot of people say, hey, I don't know if I have a lot of time to start a business. Well, you could start making time, you could start dedicating your weekends, you could start dedicating a couple hours in the evening and, and make that transition. You have time, it's not too late. And in a few years you can have a business you're proud of, maybe even less time. And I say life is way too short to do things that you don't like, do things that you love, take those risks and take those chances, like on yourself and starting a business. Because you only get one shot at this thing called life. So you might as well do things and not be regretful. For me, regrets is a big motivator. I don't want to regret things when I'm older. We all have regrets in life and I have regrets I have right now. So I know the pain of that feeling of regret. So I don't want more of those pains. I don't want more of that. So I want to continue to do things that I know I won't regret, like taking a chance on myself and starting a business. Now, obviously we're going to calculate risk and have a Runway, and we have episodes on how to prepare to make that transition here on the Hundred Dollar MBA show. But the decision to start a business at any age is a decision that you should make based on, hey, do you want to do this? If you do, then you should go for it. A lot of people think that entrepreneurs kind of start their journey when they're like 12 or something or out of their college dorm. But a lot of successful entrepreneurs started later in life. Herb Keller, the founder of Southwest, Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon. Sarah Blakely, the founder of Blakes. All these people have started their business later in life. Some more examples, Reed Hastings of Netflix. Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn. You don't have to be young to start a successful business. Successful businesses are successful because of great implementation. It's not being early in the game or being the first to the idea. It's how you implement your ideas. If you want to start a business, then your age should not be a factor to not do it. Because if you want something bad enough, you'll find a way to make it happen. Whether you're 50 or you're 25 or, or 75 for that matter, I say go for it.

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To wrap up today's lesson, starting a business in the second half of your life is totally okay, and in fact, I encourage it. You have more life experience and professional experience that can help you along the way. You're just wiser. You have more patience. You understand how the world works and understand how other people think. You've interacted with more people by this time, and those are huge advantages that you should not ignore. My advice is the best time to start a business is yesterday. But the second best time is today. So just get started, get the ball rolling, and make it happen for yourself. Don't worry about age. All right. Thank you so much for listening to the $100 MBA show. If you love what you hear, leave us an itunes rating and review. We read every single review. We'd love to hear what you love about the show. Your favorite episode is your favorite takeaway.

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And don't forget, when you leave us a rating and review, you enter our weekly random draw we call Free Ride Friday. It's our way to say thanks. Showing us love on itunes. Somebody wins on Friday. A free ride to one of our programs. Now all you got to do to enter is leave us a review on itunes. All right, before I go, I want to leave you with this. Getting started with the planning and building of your business is a good way to find out if you really want this. You might discover, hey, this is not actually what I want. What I actually needed really was a change of job or even a change of career. Sometimes we have to try things to see in reality if this is for us. And oftentimes we do try. And we're like, this is amazing. It's hard, but it's amazing. And it confirms what we believe. All right, thank you so much for listening. I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

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