1. Tech companies
2. Mostly young men
3. Looking to scale exponentially and strike it rich.
In fact, this couldn’t be further from the truth, and if you’re over 50, an immigrant, or a woman, the next business to launch in Canada might be yours. In 2016, over 6.6 million Canadians over age 50 were in the labour force – about a third, and the number of self-employed persons of all ages was about 2.7 million. If a third of those are self-employed, that’s 900,000 over-fifty entrepreneurs. A 2012 CIBC study noted that over-50s were the fastest-growing segment of the start-up market. While women don’t make up the lion’s share of business starts, their share is consistently growing. Immigrants, too, are finding that if they are struggling to find employment for others, building a business lets them create a job for themselves, and for others. So why not you?
As for the money, there’s nothing to say you won’t strike it rich. There are some late bloomers who went on to have very successful enterprises. Entrepreneurs also identify many other reasons, such as values alignment, more purposeful work, providing necessary but “missing” services in their communities, and employing others in their communities.
There are tremendous advantages to being an entrepreneur when you’ve already logged some career and life experience. Among these, you may have assets you can leverage for start-up capital, so you don’t have to hand over part of your business to venture capitalists, but can retain control for yourself. You’ve also had lots of time to observe a wide variety of business models that work (and don’t), and you’ve built valuable skills that can form the basis of your new enterprise.
Given the high number of workers over age 50, and yet an increasing youth bias in the workplace, there are plenty of mature workers who are (in the words of one columnist we read recently) “disappearing” themselves – doing everything they can to disguise or hide their age. Wouldn’t you think that at age 50 you had finally earned the right to be yourself? So if you’ve reached the half-century mark, we’d like to encourage you to consider the “platinum pivot© ” – think now about how you’re going to take ownership of your career and rely on your own talents for your next 20, 30 or more years of your work life. Sure, there are plenty of youthful startups out there, but they’ll all get older eventually, if they survive. You’ve just got a head start.
We’re Megann and Steve Willson, and we’re the Founders and Partners at PANOPTIKA. We started our business in our 40s, and we’re still going strong, nearly 20 years later. Let us help you build a business that’s just right for you. You can find us on Twitter, on Facebook, and on LinkedIn, and we’d be glad to have you join our inner circle and subscribe for weekly insights using the orange button, below. Let’s get growing, together.