Retirement is not only the time to sleep longer hours, spend the whole day binge watching movies on Netflix and traveling the world. Retirement could be a great time to pursue some of the passions you neglected during your career years. Retirement could be a time to try out new life experiences. Retirement could also be a great time to give back to society or make the world a better place. If you have had a “hasty” retirement, retirement could also be a great time to make some more money.
Interestingly, starting a business in retirement is somewhat fundamentally different from quitting your job to start a business. Here are 6 tips on starting a business successfully in retirement.
Understand your business
The first tip to setting up a successful business in retirement is to know and understand the business in which you want to engage yourself. Understanding your business starts with seeing a problem that you want to solve with your business. Afterwards, you’ll need to conduct market research to know the viability of the business. You also need to know the feast and famine cycles of the business so that you can mitigate risks effectively.
Strengths and weaknesses are no joke
Talking about strengths and weaknesses sounds cliché but you’ll need to know your strong and weak points to give your business the best odds of success. The fact that you are starting your business in retirement gives you the benefit of hindsight to identify your strong and weak points when you look back at your working years. Passion isn’t enough to build a successful business; hence, you need to ensure that you have the skills – taking stock can help you upgrade your weak points.
Decide on how much time you want to give the business
Retirement will give you loads of free time that you can burn as you deem fit; however, starting a business can take a great deal of that time. Ideally, retirement should be a time for you to slow down and take life at your own pace – before you start a business, know how much time you can afford to give the business so you don’t end up as a slave to your business. Many people starting a business in retirement often lean towards working in isolation to avoid managing a team. However, running a one-man show will take all your time and sap your energy. Hence, you may want to consider hiring interns or freelancers.
Be proactive with funding
You’ll need money to make money and your business is not likely to get off from the idea stage if you can’t raise startup capital. However, you don’t have to keep your business in a perpetual state of incubation because you are finding it hard to raise money to do business. For instance, you can start small instead of looking for six-figure startup capital. Once the business is up and running, you can get expansion capital by borrowing against your cash flow, doing invoice factoring, merchant cash advances, or even VC funding.
Leverage your connections
In continuation of the point above, you should not hesitate to leverage the connections you’ve build in your career to advance your business objectives. For instance, if you want to start a consultancy business, your professional connections can yield wealth of information on potential clients. More so, you can leverage your connections to find an attorney, an accountant, a designer, or headhunter that can help you find the right people.
Start with the end in mind
Nothing lasts forever and the stark reality is that human strength, fitness, and life is finite. If you are starting a business in retirement at 65, you should understand that you might not have the strength to keep on running the business after your 75th birthday. Before you start the business, you need to be sure about your exit strategy. If you plan to sell the business, your management process might be somewhat different than if you plan to leave the business to your children.