Boomers heed call of the entrepreneur

Posted on July 2, 2008
Filed Under Job Seeking

Boomers heed call of the entrepreneur

Across the globe, baby boomers are leaving their cubicles, putting together business plans and becoming entrepreneurs.

Whether these boomers get financial, social or emotional gains, or a combination of each, many are finding more joy in running their own business than jobs they held in the corporate world.

Giving back to the community is what Jim Newsom, co-owner of the Fort Worth Running Co. on Camp Bowie Boulevard, gets from his career shift.

Seven years ago, Newsom left a management position at RadioShack Corp., where he worked for eight years.

“Forty hours a week sitting at a computer screen, it just had gotten to the point where I couldn’t do it anymore,” Newsom said. “A sit-down desk job for a few years, it’s OK, but after a while you get to the point where this ain’t fun anymore.”

Newsom left RadioShack, bought out a partner at his son’s store, the Fort Worth Running Co., became co-owner and hasn’t looked back, he said.

In 2007, 4.7 million baby boomers between ages 45 to 64 were self-employed in non-agriculture industries, with 812,000 self-employed in the agriculture industry, said Teri Morisi, an economist with the United States Department of Labor.

The move toward entrepreneurship is growing across the world and two schools of thought exist as to why boomers leave their jobs: They are either pushed or pulled to leave, said Siri Terjesen, assistant professor at Texas Christian University’s Neeley School of Business. In 2006, Terjesen wrote her thesis on the trend.

Being pushed from a job comes from frustration with unhappiness, a bad work environment, the glass ceiling or feeling unchallenged to the point that a person leaves a company, Terjesen said. Being pulled toward entrepreneurship is when a person follows a long-standing desire to do something different, start a new venture and change their career.

“I think in most cases it’s a little bit of both,” Terjesen said. “People are frustrated with or would like to change their current situation, and not just change careers or jobs but would like to change it to start something new.”

Age may have something to do with the trend, she said.

“There’s this idea that there are certain ages when people suddenly feel like they’ve got a kick in the butt, and those are ages that end with 0 or 5; so 40, 45, 50, 55, 60, 65, just hitting that milestone birthday can be something,” Terjesen said.

Becoming an entrepreneur after a corporate job often gives a person a sense of control and an outlet to use skills they learned in the course of their corporate job, but may not have been able to use before changing careers, Terjesen said.

“You’re suddenly in control of all of your value chain of activity, where as, say you worked in sales at RadioShack, so you were responsible for store sales and hiring, but you weren’t responsible for corporate strategy or store strategy, or even hiring, maybe that was somebody else, suddenly you’re responsible for all of those elements,” Terjesen said.

Sometimes, however, baby boomers leave their jobs and go into an unrelated field, such as a person in retail sales moving to open a restaurant. For people who move into an unrelated field, the risk of failure in their business increases, but that isn’t always the case, Terjesen said.

Newsom has a degree in management and experience in management from his corporate job, and feels like he’s using what he learned throughout his career more effectively now at the Fort Worth Running Co. than he has before, he said.

“The fact is with this business, it’s brought me closer to management principles than anything I’ve ever done in my life,” Newsom said.

For anyone jumping into the entrepreneurial world, having a solid business plan is the most important first step and is often challenging to put together, Terjesen said.

The Fort Worth Business Assistance Center, which is part of the city’s economic development department, offers a $450, 10-week training course called Project NEW where someone can begin the course with only a business idea and end with a completed business plan.

The course provides information on market research; how to organize a business legally, as in deciding whether to have a partnership or limited liability corporation; how to put a marketing plan together; how to use the Internet to research the business; business planning; record keeping and managing cash flow, said Dorothy Wing, manager of business development for Fort Worth.

While boomers fall into an age group where individuals most often have the start-up capital and experience to open a business, Terjesen often hears her students say they want to enter the corporate world for three to five years to gain experience and learn business skills, then leave to start their own venture.

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