Introduction

When you think of someone launching a start-up, let's be honest, the image of a twenty-something techie, clad in a hoodie, jeans and fuzzy Allbirds, those sneakerlike shoes made from wool and castor bean oil, springs to mind.

Think again.

Gen Xers and baby boomers are the trendy entrepreneurs, the new risk takers, and though their successful not-so-techie businesses may be under the cool radar, they're on the rise. In Never Too Old to Get Rich: The Entrepreneur's Guide to Starting a Business Mid-Life, I'll introduce you to the "kids" on the start-up field and show you how it's done.

Filled with inspiring stories from people who have started their own businesses mid-life, Never Too Old to Get Rich is an exciting road map for anyone looking to be their own boss and make their next act building their dream business.

The variety of businesses people are starting in mid-life is amazingly diverse. From a gin distiller to a movie maker to a jewelry designer and a manufacturer of packaging, these in-depth testimonials offer encouragement and advice and prove that it's possible to pursue your passion and build your own successful business at any age. I have interviewed hundreds of older entrepreneurs around the world who are seeking a more fulfilling path. To me, the bottom-line case for why this is such a good idea for older adults is twofold: financial security and, importantly, a personal return.

In this book, you will find:

• Up-to-date resources for launching a business at mid-life
• Snappy profiles of 20 successful older entrepreneurs, describing their inspirational journeys to launching a business or a nonprofit; Q&A conversations; and pull-out boxes containing action steps
• Questions older entrepreneurs must ask before they take the leap to a new venture
• My three-part fitness program: guidelines for becoming financially fit, physically fit, and spiritually fit
• In-depth material on how would-be mid-life entrepreneurs can find capital to start their own business
• Each chapter ends with a recap and your to-do list of action steps

There's a way of playing safe, there's a way of using tricks and there's the way I like to play which is dangerously - where you're going to take a chance on making mistakes in order to create something you haven't created before.

- Dave Brubeck, the late American jazz pianist and composer, who was still performing at concert halls around the world at the age of 81, speaking in the PBS documentary Rediscovering Dave Brubeck.

I carry this quote tucked in my wallet to remind me of why I started my own company as a writer, speaker, and consultant when I was in my 40s, and maybe you should, too. It's about fearlessly creating something new . regardless of your age. It's scary. It's risky. It's hard work, and most entrepreneurs I have ever interviewed have told me that their only regret is that they didn't do it sooner.

More older adults have become entrepreneurs in the last decade than younger people. No kidding. Counterintuitive, right? But it's true. 50+ entrepreneurship is on the rise, and I'll explain why shortly. Being your own boss is no longer a young person's game.

Here's refreshing news for boomers and Gen Xers: when it comes to launching a successful business, youth is not the magic elixir.

"Successful entrepreneurs are middle-aged, not young," according to Age and High-Growth Entrepreneurship, a paper by Pierre Azoulay and J. Daniel Kim of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management; Benjamin Jones of Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management; and Javier Miranda of the Census Bureau's Center for Administrative Records Research.

Most Successful Entrepreneurs: Middle Age and Beyond

"We find that age indeed predicts success, and sharply, but in the opposite way that many observers and investors propose," they wrote. "The highest success rates in entrepreneurship come from founders in middle age and beyond."

The provocative paper may stun some people, but not me. It confirms what I've found studying and interviewing mid-life entrepreneurs for more than a decade; I profiled successful launchers in my book What's Next?

Refuting the Conventional Wisdom

Azoulay and coauthors also wrote, "Many observers, and many investors, believe that young people are especially likely to produce the most successful new firms. We use administrative data at the U.S. Census Bureau to study the ages of founders of growth-oriented start-ups in the past decade and find no evidence to suggest that founders in their 20s are especially likely to succeed. Rather, all evidence points to founders being especially successful when starting businesses in middle age or beyond, while young founders appear disadvantaged."

While the authors parsed their research by age, geography, and industry, I was disappointed they didn't tease out data on gender; more on that shortly.

Azoulay and coauthors calculated a mean age of 45 among the 1,700 founders of the fastest-growing new ventures in the past decade. And they found the "batting average" for creating successful firms rises dramatically with age. "A 50-year-old founder is 1.8 times more likely to achieve upper-tail growth than a 30-year-old founder," they wrote.

Older Entrepreneurs versus Younger Ones

As my colleague Richard Eisenberg noted in one of his Next Avenue columns, research from the Kauffman Foundation, a nonpartisan group supporting entrepreneurship, backs the researchers' analysis. In its 2018 State of Entrepreneurship survey of 2,165 business, Kauffman described how older entrepreneurs reported having less difficulty starting their businesses than younger ones, in a variety of ways.

The authors of Age and High-Growth Entrepreneurship theorize that there are a few reasons an older entrepreneur may reap the benefits of start-up success over a younger one: greater management, marketing, and finance experience, and richer, deeper industry knowledge. Also - and this is important - they may have larger financial resources to tap and more social networks to mine for support in leveraging their idea.

The Importance of Work Experience for Successful Ventures

That said, explained Azoulay and coauthors in a Harvard Business Review post about the study, "we found that work experience plays a critical role. Relative to founders with no relevant experience, those with at least three years of prior work experience in the same narrow industry as their startup were 85% more likely to launch a highly successful startup."

And there's another study worth noting here. Boomers and Gen Xers - your working world is in for major disturbances between now and 2030, according to a report from the management consulting firm Bain & Company. The depth and breadth of changes in the 2020s will distinguish this transformation from many previous ones, according to the report Labor 2030: The Collision of Demographics, Automation and Inequality.

But here's the bigger shock: some of those gyrations will make it easier for people in their 50s and 60s to start businesses, the Bain forecasters say. Automation may lower the cost barriers to entrepreneurship. The report notes that "entrepreneurs can use social media postings, targeted search engine ads and email newsletters to launch businesses at a fraction of the marketing budget previously required."

Sorry for the statistic overload, but I have to set the table. Consider this:

• Over the past decade, the highest rate of entrepreneurial activity belongs to the 55-to-64 age group, according to the Kauffman Foundation.
• Researchers at the Kauffman Foundation's 2018 State of Entrepreneurship survey of 2,165 business owners found that most older entrepreneurs had support from family and friends to start their businesses, and they were slightly more likely than younger ones to get the encouragement: 82% of those 45+ had support compared with 80% of those under 45.
• Also, older entrepreneurs reported having less difficulty starting their businesses than younger ones, in a variety of ways. For example, while 32% of start-up owners under 45 said obtaining the necessary licenses to operate their business was difficult, only 23% of older ones did. Also, 23% of owners under 45 said registering their business for a state tax ID was difficult, but just 14% of those 45+ felt that way. And 21% of those under 45 said applying for loans was difficult, but a mere 14% of those 45+ did.
• More than half of all U.S. small-business owners are age 50 years and over, according to the U.S. Small Business Administration.
• Older entrepreneurs are more successful: 70% of their start-ups last more than three years, compared with 28% for younger entrepreneurs.
• Approximately 29 million people - two in five Americans ages 50 to 70 - are interested in starting...