Perspective: Entrepreneurship is the New Retirement

Interesting take in the latest US New and World Report, an article by Emily Brandon titled "Entrepreneurship is the New Retirement" starts with this line:

Entrepreneurs never really retire; they just move on to their next project.

Brandon goes on to talk about early retirees choosing to go back in to business, albeit small or startup business.  Some of them choose to do so based on financial needs - Brandon notes one armchair entrepreneur put all of her life savings in to a franchise since it looked more lucrative than keeping it in stocks and bonds - but many choose an entrepreneurial retirement as a way to maintain and sharpen mental faculties.

When I was asked to write the business plan for KOSBE back in 2004, one of the underlying reasons that my clients, the Kingsport Chamber and the City of Kingsport, wanted to address small business development was due to the fact that the town's largest employer had been systematically reducing headcount through enticement, namely lump-sum early retirement packages.

These former Fortune 500 executives would spend a few months doing nothing (or playing golf every day, which was a bit worse than doing nothing, although it may not have seemed so at the time) and then realize they missed work.

Yet many of them did not want to go back into full-time work, so we put an explicit strategy goal in place to address their need for synaptic stimulation with an equally challenging goal of finding mentors for young up-and-coming small business owners. One of our goals stated:


 Calculated risk-taking coupled with effective entrepreneurship allows mentoring opportu-
nities between the young just starting a business career and the experienced early retiree
or “gray hair” – both together can provide a balance of risk taking and risk mitigation.

In other words, we offered to work with the early retirees, many of whom chose to stay in the local area rather than uproot family, to get their own business started IF they were willing to work with a young person, mentoring them and teaching a skill, with the possibility of turning over the business to the young person once the retiree really wanted to retire. A succession-planned business from the outset.

Turned out to be highly popular among these early retirees, and may have served to foreshadow the fact that Entrepreneurship is the New Retirement.