Nearly 30% of employed people in their 70s are self-employed. Lower startup costs and online tools have made it easier for older founders to launch businesses. Charlotte Bishop, George Koenig, and others prove that entrepreneurship in your 60s and 70s can deliver purpose and real income.
Questions this video answers
Nearly 30%.
Claire Ansberry.
She is 80 and runs Life Files (helps older adults organize their lives remotely).
George Koenig is 70 and launched E Caregivers, a platform linking families with caregivers (claims up to 50% savings).
Actor Judson Vaughn is 71 and teamed with attorney Judson Graves, 77, to teach courtroom performance skills via online courses.
Chapters
Septuagenarians are launching and winning. The new startup wave isn't 20 somethings in hoodies, it's 70 somethings with Rolodex. According to the Wall Street Journal's Claire Ansberry, nearly 30% of employed people in their 70s are self employed, almost double the share in their 60s. The appeal? Being your own boss, setting your own schedule and finally solving problems you've seen for decades. Babson's Donna Kelly says 10 technology has flattened the Runway. People can now sell from home and don't need much startup capital. Take Charlotte Bishop. She's 80 and runs Life Files, professionals, helping older adults organize their lives remotely. George Koenig, age 70, launched E Caregivers, a platform linking families directly with caregivers to save up to 50%. And actor Judson Vaughn, 71, teamed with attorney Judson Graves, 77, to teach courtroom performance skills through online courses. As Vaughn put it, they're boring as hell. But now, even at 70, he says, I want to pass on what I've discovered. Experience may be the ultimate unfair advantage if you're an entrepreneur. What's the real message here? This idea that if you want to be an entrepreneur, you have to be 19, wearing a hoodie, barely shaved is not reality anymore. There are lots of people in their 60s, 70s and 80s starting new businesses and they are thriving. That's a good thing. Don't use your age as an excuse. If you have an idea for a business inside, let's dig a little deeper here. Now, one caveat if you are trying there's different types of businesses and the word entrepreneur is thrown around loosely. Starting a a business where you're delivering newspapers. I don't think anyone does that anymore. That's a part time job. It's not really being an entrepreneur. I think of an entrepreneur. An entrepreneur is someone who is starting something new, something innovative, something that is, you know, no offense to anyone who is running a McDonald's hamburger franchise. It's a difficult job. I couldn't do it. But that's not what I think of as being an entrepreneur. It's starting some new jobs business where it's an actual new idea. So having said all that, I don't think you're going to have venture capitalists give you $5 billion or $5 million if you're 75 years old running a business and it's your first time business. Now obviously if you're an Ellison or a Musk in his early 50s, you can be any age if you already have a lot of successes behind you and publicly traded companies and exits. Sure, you can raise money, but it was interesting to me that the Wall Street Journal did take the time to interview a lot of people in their 70s. Of course a detractor could say, well of course TJ they're doing that because cost of living is so high and so many other expenses are. Housing is high. They're not entrepreneurs, they're just taking an extra gig at the local Safeway to be able to afford rent. That may be some of it, but I don't think that's what they're talking about here. It's just there are a lot of people actually starting new businesses because they want to. I mean these are not businesses digging ditches that rely on raw strength and broad. These are businesses that rely on your brain, your people skills, your social skills, your communication skills. And for many people, 70s, 80s, 90s, they can still be at, if not their peak performance at a very, very high level. So why not use it? So let's look at some more of the statistics. As the article points out, 30% of working 70 somethings are self employed. That is a little bit different. Yeah, you could always say, well grandma babysat and took in sewing once a week in the olden days she was self employed. This is a little bit different. Many are starting real businesses. As I mentioned in the opening news read, some people are doing online courses, which is the subject I know a little about since that's my primary business of course of selling my 300 courses to 12 million online student enrollments. So that is something you can do at any age. It's certainly something I hope to be doing in my 70s and 80s and 90s and who knows, not get ahead of ourselves. So 30% of 70 somethings are self employed if they're working. According to AARP, they have something called work for yourself at 50 helps older adults explore self employment. Part of it is, I mean I've experienced this in my own career. It's just so much easier, easier to start a business early in my career. The whole idea of starting a business was complicated and expensive. It was, the whole concept was you had to find an office, sign a lease. No one worked from home in the early 80s, mid-80s. You had to sign a lease for a year. You had to have a executive assistant, secretaries as they were called, logo, letterhead. It was. You had to mail things out back and forth. You needed someone to, to carry your packages and letters to the post office. It was an expensive, time consuming sort of bureaucratic thing to start any kind of a business nowadays, you can really sit it in your bed, Even if it's a hospital bed, if you have access to a computer, you can do everything you need to start a business. Now, let me not sound like a junior varsity Gary Vaynerchuk. And I like Gary, but it's not easy. Most people who start businesses don't make any money, so let's be blunt about it. But you can make money. And it's never. It's not easy, but it's never been easier to start a business with limited capital and to do it on your timeframe. Now, it used to be he wanted to run a store, okay, you got to be open 12 hours a day, at least six days a week. And if, and if you're not there to man the store, well, then you got to hire people and they don't want to show up, so you have to fire them. And you got to recruit new people. And it's a whole big management night. Forget going on vacation. Well, these days, retirees and other people, people in their 70s, people in their 20s, can start a business. The store can be open 24 hours a day, and you can still have a life. If you only want to work four hours a day, you can't. Doesn't mean it's going to make you rich. But maybe your aspirations are low. Maybe your goal is to make an extra $20,000 a year and you want to work two and a half hours a day. That is a reasonable plan for a lot of seniors. And for that matter, high school kids can do that as well. If you're willing to work on it and bootstrap. Again, there's some confusion over the term entrepreneur, because then people do think, oh, you want to be the next Apple, the next Facebook, the next Google? To have a business that scales at that level even today typically does take massive amounts of venture capital. Now, if you're here in the United States, you do have a huge advantage of companies that do receive venture capital funding in America that they're averaging $5 million per startup, whereas in Europe, it's only $1 million. So you have a huge advantage being an American. But I won't kid you, I don't think if you're 79 years old and your name is not Larry Ellison, the venture capitalists are going to be lining up to give you cash. But again, you don't necessarily need it. I'd urge you to check this out. At the Wall Street Journal. In the news today, they also profile e caregivers, list bio professionals and Judson Squared, the continuing ed program for teaching lawyers performance skills. They all sound like great ideas. And more important, these people in their 70s, I think, are having the time of their life. They're being useful. Part of the problem with aging, frankly, and I see this already with some of my friends, it's not that you descend into poverty, because traditionally, across every culture, for 99.9% of human history, the problem with getting older is you couldn't earn your keep, you couldn't gather enough food, and you starved to death. And as recently in the United States, going back to the early 1960s, senior citizens were the poorest demographic. Social Security, other entitlements did change that. You could argue we've gone too far in the extreme of having government not help kids, young people, and it's all going towards senior citizens. But that's a debate for another day. The reality is most senior citizens today are not fighting for their next meal. Not to say there isn't some out here, but most are not fighting for their next meal. They're not fighting trying to figure out how to pay for their health care costs because they're on Medicare, so they actually have time. If you have your health, you have your brain. Why not use it? Because as many people as I've seen who retire that they're going to live it up, I'm going to enjoy it. Now it's me time. And they're sitting back and all they're doing is watching cable TV news, people screaming at each other, getting angrier and angrier, and they're yelling at the TV. That's a horrible retirement. Why not spend, you know, 10 minutes a day looking at that stuff, watching a show like this, and then spend the rest of your time actually doing a business? Maybe you don't care about the money, maybe you don't need the money, but the money can be for your children, your grandchildren, your charities, your legacy. People who work because they have a purpose, because they have a mission, because they have some joy, don't feel tired at the end of the day. They're not grumbling on Monday morning. I've seen people who are retired and yeah, they don't have to get up early Monday morning. They don't have to have a commute they don't like. They don't have to have a boss they don't like. Does that make them happy? No, it often makes them grumpy. Ah, there aren't any good movies made anymore. Ah, there's no good restaurants in my neighborhood. They need something to do. So that is my other big message to you. If you are getting closer to retirement age, whatever that is in your culture, don't do it. Start a new business. That is my. It will keep you young. It will keep your brain active. I have friends my age who've already retired. I would not want to be them. I find great joy in engaging with you here on a daily basis. Now I'm going to say something. You're going to say, this is hubris. I'm not comparing myself to Paul McCartney. But Paul McCartney's over 80. He's not retired. He is traveling the world, making music, forming, speaking out. He's not doing it for the money. He's already a billionaire. Jerry Seinfeld's pushing 70. Let's see him retiring. He's not doing it for the money. He's not a billionaire. He's pretty close to one. He is doing comedy because he enjoys it. So that's, I think, the huge luxury of a lot of senior citizens when they start businesses, they can truly focus on something where they have expertise, passion, and it brings them joy. I hope you have joy in your career, regardless of whether you're 70 or 27.
