Over the past two weeks, we’ve looked at entrepreneurship.
First, we met Margaret Manning who inspired us with her story as the founder of Sixty and Me, and last week we met Kimberly Ann Jimenez who spoke about the desirable habits that women entrepreneurs should cultivate to accelerate the growth of their businesses.
Today, we also want to talk about starting a business, but this week we’ll meet another wonderful older-age entrepreneur.
At the age of 64, Paul Tasner was called into a meeting at the company he was working at and told that he and several other staff had been fired.
As he says in this short but informative TED Talk from 2017, retirement was not an option for Paul, so after a couple of years of soulless consulting work, and with more than 40 years of experience as a manufacturing-sector engineer, he decided he wanted to start his own business.
Paul’s passion was clean technology. He wanted to start a company to design and manufacture biodegradable packaging derived from waste products as a replacement for the plastic that’s so ubiquitous and harmful.
Fast forward five years and Paul and his business partner have achieved a stellar success – revenue has doubled every year; the business has no debt; it has several marquee clients; they’ve secured their product patents, and they’ve won over 20 awards.
It’s an immense achievement, overcoming obstacles such as competing for funding against online entrepreneurs in their 20s.
Paul tells us that he’s now doing the most rewarding and meaningful work of his life, but one difficulty that he’s yet to overcome is the absence of peer support from older-age first-time entrepreneurs.
It’s now Paul’s ambition to help build a community of likeminded entrepreneurs, “bold men and women who are checking in when their peers are in essence checking out.”
He hopes the community of older-age entrepreneurs will provide the role models and support network that he lacked when he began his business, connecting people across industries, regions and countries.
Small business is well known as the engine of jobs growth, providing 64% of new jobs in the US. What’s far less well known is the high success rate of businesses started by older entrepreneurs – 70% compared with 28% among younger businesspeople.
It augurs well for a future where far too often people aged over 50 are simply assumed to be past their best, good only for golf or anything else equally inane.
At Switched ON Living, we say ‘NUTS’ to that!
As Paul says, we looked forward to the day when 70 over 70 is as common as 30 under 30.
