A lot of women wrongly assume that starting a new business is something for the young. The fact is that you can start a new business at any age – something that the likes of Brenda Cascio, Auria Abraham and Shelley Goodstein can attest – and it be a roaring success. In fact, the very fact that you’re an older woman may be to your advantage.
Not convinced? Here are just some of the benefits of starting a business post-40…
You Have More Life Experience
As a 40+-year-old woman, chances are you’ve gone through some stuff. You’ve been around the block a few times and you have bundles of life experience at your disposal. This will help you to make critical decisions more effectively. It will also help you to identify good opportunities and overcome the challenges you face as you work to become a successful business owner. Your age will give you a true advantage.
You Have More Financial Security
Chances are that your finances are in better shape now than they were when you were a 20-year-old kid. That means that you can take more risks, and they won’t be as risky. It also means that you won’t have to sacrifice so much of your lifestyle to set up a new business and pursue success. Money is one of the biggest barriers to setting up as an entrepreneur, so if you’re in the position where you have some, you are in a really strong position to create a business that succeeds.
You Know Who You Are
One of the major advantages of starting a new business when you’re a little older is the fact that you are also a little wiser. You’ve had time to get to know yourself and you can more easily identify your strengths and weaknesses. Having this information available to you means that you should be able to come up with a business idea that’s tailored to your strengths, and which minimizes your weaknesses, or at the very least, you’ll be able to delegate the stuff you don’t do well to someone else. So many young people go wrong by thinking they can do it all, only to see their business fail – this is something you can avoid.
You Know It’ll Be Hard
Another thing that young entrepreneurs often do is make the mistake of thinking that as long as they have a good idea, they’ll be able to make their business work and it will be easy. As a more mature woman, you’ll know that achieving anything takes a lot of hard work and that there’ll be more than one setback along the way. Because you know it will be hard, you’ll have more realistic expectations, which means you won’t quit your job right away or start selling stock in a business that’s going nowhere. You’ll take your time, but the hard work in and get things right.
There are More Tools at Your Disposal
If you’d started your own business 20 years ago, you wouldn’t have had access to apps that make doing your accounts as simple as clicking a button; you wouldn’t have been easily able to get a virtual address for business provider to maintain your privacy, and you certainly wouldn’t have been able to digitize every single aspect of your business, so that you could work anywhere in the world… and that’s just for starters. Starting a business today is, in many ways, as hard as it ever was, but in lots of [ractical ways, it is much easier thanks to the many advances in technology which take up a lot of the slack and enable you to run a new business more efficiently with fewer, if any, employees.
You Have More Connections
Chances are if you’ve made it past the age of 40, you’ve spent a lot of years working hard, and during those years, there’s no doubt that you’ve met a lot of people and made a lot of contacts. Since it is often who you know that counts in business, this puts you at a distinct advantage to young entrepreneurs who may not have had the chance to network extensively as of yet.
The Bottom Line
If you’re serious about starting a new business, don’t let your age stand in your way. You are every bit as capable of starting a new business as anyone else, and in fact, you may even be in a better position to make a success of it than a lot of people. We wish you luck.
Leave a Reply