When it comes to business, age does matter—but not for the reasons you might be assuming. Age matters because in business, you’re not just bringing your age to the table, you’re bringing your experience. There’s no denying experience is almost everything to a business, and with aging comes experience.
There are people who start a business at the age of 18 and people who do that at 60. They all bring different advantages to a business and often complement each other. The 18-year-old might be more tech-savvy, while the 60-year-old might be better at communicating with people. There’s no hard-set rule regarding what each person can bring, but age, in general, must account for something.
A Couple of Facts
Several studies have been carried out to analyze the correlation between age and entrepreneurship. A general conclusion revealed that 45 years is the average age of entrepreneurs who launch a successful startup. People over 55 years of age are actually twice as likely as those under 35 to launch a high-growth startup.
Successful Entrepreneurs
On the younger side, there are some big names, of course, like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, yet they are the exception rather than the rule. There is always a website available that will be able to give you more information on interesting entrepreneurs who began their startups with more than a few gray hairs on their head. We can also see that retirement is now viewed as the beginning of something completely new. Or at the very least, it’s the time you can bring the experience you’ve gained over the years into something new.
Some Advantages
Opening a business later in life has its struggles, but it does come with lots of advantages, too. You might never have even thought about starting a business after retirement, but it might be just what you need to make your retirement a happy one. Even better, you can partner up with a younger person, and this is the fusion you can expect:
Risk-taking vs paranoia
It’s no secret that young people are better at taking risks. They thrive on it. As we grow older, we get more scared—almost paranoid. After all, you’ve been lied to, stolen from, stabbed in the back and all those other little things that come along in life. In business, you cannot always dive in headfirst, nor can you just spend the time getting your feet wet. You need a balance.“I know” vs “I’m learning”
Anyone old enough will remember the time when they thought they knew everything. It’s really not a nice phase to be in. Believing you already know everything and there’s nothing left to learn is too dangerous for a business. The part of wisdom is knowing that you don’t know everything.Emotion vs logic
Nothing is written in stone, and you can have older people who are dictated by their hearts more than their minds. But generally, an older person will not let their emotions control them in matters that do not concern the heart. Older business people will look at things objectively and solve problems in a logical way.More to lose
Perhaps having little to lose is the biggest advantage a young business person has. They can fail and pick themselves up, and start all over again. Yet, the older person has more at stake and knows a failure can ruin them. Restarting is much more difficult for them. Having said that, it goes back again to being more logical and using wisdom to make relatively better and safer decisions.Contacts
Over the years, an older person would have accumulated an impressive list of contacts. Unlike very young people, the list would most likely include successful people. Much of business is about the contacts and the network you have.Since age is just a number, there’s nothing stopping you from owning a business. In fact, older age is often a staple of most successful businesses and startups. From the numbers, we can see that your retirement age is more of an advantage rather than a snag when it comes to starting and succeeding in business.
