Going Your Own Way
Baby boomers are rewriting the rules of retirement again. This time they're tapping their nest eggs as entrepreneurs
It all started with a cookie. Dark-chocolate chunk with hazelnut, to be specific. And with that first scrumptious 2-ounce morsel, Franny Martin left the corporate world behind for good. In 2002, after three decades doing marketing for fast-food giants Burger King, Domino's Pizza, and McDonald's, Martin started up Cookies on Call, baking out of her home in Saugatuck, Mich. "Bill Gates started in his garage, and I started in my kitchen," she says.
Cookies on Call isn't exactly the Microsoft of the cookie world, at least not yet. Currently, there are one storefront in Saugatuck, a thriving online order business, and 61 varieties of handmade cookies to choose from. But visions of a global cookie empire aren't what nudged Martin out of the corporate world into "Frannyland," as she likes to call it. "I just decided if it was my last day on Earth, is this really what I wanted to be doing?" she recalls. "I mean, I lived it, and being in corporate was great, but that's not how I would want to be spending my last day on Earth. A really good friend of mine had taken ill--she has passed away now--and I just realized that life is really too short to be doing something that I didn't want to be doing anymore."
A new chapter. That sort of existential reflection probably strikes home for a lot of baby boomers these days. The first of that influential generation turns 60 this year--Martin herself hits the magic number in May--and many of them who toil as wage slaves are surely asking themselves, "Is this all there is?" or "What comes next?" For a growing number, the answer involves leaving their current job--but not retiring. Like Martin, they're instead choosing to start a new chapter in their working lives, one where finally they're the boss.
"There's no question that senior entrepreneurs are out there," says John Challenger, CEO of Challenger, Gray & Christmas, an outplacement consulting firm based in Chicago. A 2005 CGC study of 3,000 job seekers found that 13 percent started their own businesses in the second quarter, up from 9.9 percent in the same quarter a year ago. And of that group, 86.6 percent were over 40, evidence that the next big wave of entrepreneurs may be seasoned workers, not college dropouts in Silicon Valley with a breakthrough technology concept. "There's more and more access to self-employment possibilities as people decide to put off retirement as they get into their 60s and 70s and 80s," Challenger explains.
In addition, a CGC analysis of government data shows that those 55 to 64 and older represent one of the fastest-growing groups of self-employed workers. Some 1.8 million American workers ages 55 to 64 are self-employed outside of agriculture, up 29 percent from 2000, according to the Labor Department. The number of do-it-yourselfers 65 and older has grown 18 percent to 756,000. And boomers 45 to 54 years old make up more than a quarter of the nation's 9.6 million self-employed. Overall, boomers and older entrepreneurs now account for 54 percent of self-employed workers, up from 48.5 percent in 2000.
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