The Final Career Move – Sunset

The National average age for retirement is 64-67. In that time frame, if you were blessed with the opportunity to transition to a retirement plan that has you financially secure and occupied with activities that keep you alert and challenged, enjoy!

Unfortunately, very few of my peers were ready at the prescribed ages, either financially or with a robust transition plan from their careers to retirement. A few were delusional that they would enjoy endless days of golf or fishing. The realities are that boredom will quickly set in and they will begin to atrophy.

Also, assimilation to a home life can be traumatic for everyone. I have heard families opine that they now had a stranger living in their homes full time.

In the transition, some become afflicted with diseases that are typical of an aging body. Those who were looking forward to 25+ years of the good life may become victims of debilitating ailments and, ultimately, premature death. We cannot predict the genetic hand we were dealt nor potential external influences. My mother lived to 99, but that is not a reliable predictor of my future.

I am a business consultant and expert witness. Both are extremely challenging in continually acquiring work and then conducting the assignments. I have been blessed with a very fulfilling career, but challenged with marketing my services. In retrospect, the challenges were offset by stunning success stories such as those I led as a consultant to Dell Computer and other organizations.

When the financial crisis of 2008 hit the Country, I was 53 years old. Retirement has never been in my career plans, but instant financial collapse and the end of billable work were not either. After years of painful and methodical processes of debt relief and mortgage restructuring, we were at a point of being able to stay in our home and covering our basic living costs.

My business partner and I had grand plans to spend the rest of our careers endowing the small business world with our incredible experiences and knowledge base in pursuing business excellence. My partner had started and sold two successful businesses and I have worked with more than 700 companies. We believed that it would be immoral not to endow future generations with our accumulated experiences.

Unfortunately, our services were not in high demand by millennials and others who were generations ahead of our times. Certainly, each generation brings new values and ideas to their approach to business. Some of our boomer colleagues would refrain that the world was better in the good old days. We dismissed that premise as parochial and it did not allow for evolving value systems and changing market demands.

We were invested in our experiences that successful companies follow a positive moral compass and that they are successful because they provide products and services of value. We conducted workshops and consulting assignments that were embraced by enlightened leaders and dismissed by those who believe that business success is driven by their will to bring their "must have" products and services to market.

Unfortunately, for the last decade or more, most of our work came from being expert witnesses in products liability and organizational negligence, than in proactive consulting. It is regrettable that so many companies wind up in lawsuits that damage them forever, when they could have avoided the circumstances leading to the litigation.

My partner was taken by Covid 19 in 2020. That caused me to have to abandon the plans we jointly had for our futures and face the final career challenge, sunset. Over the last year, I have also been afflicted with some of the diseases and maladies of a mid-70’s person. They too have been a wakeup call for a sunset plan.

The first step was to assess my potential capabilities for the next 10 to 15 years. I do not travel any more and my focus must be on writing, training, consulting, and expert testimony from my home office. So far, that plan is working. I am in sync with the business world becoming virtual and I have worked from my home office for more than 30 years, giving me a leg up on the new business normal.

The premise that we had become anachronisms and irrelevant was also unwarranted because our benchmarks of business excellence and risk avoidance were more important than ever. We just needed to make them relevant to current businesspeople who were experiencing undermining of their companies due to Covid and ever-changing labor and business environments.

My medical wakeup calls have caused changes in diet and exercise that should preclude further unexpected physical crises. I have enrolled in long term care programs that continually monitor for potential threats.

The final element of my sunset plan is to surround myself with colleagues who share my values and passions. They are leaders in organizations that have their pulse on the future of my profession of quality management. I am currently in collaboration with Quality Digest, The Kaizen Institute and Exemplar Global to provide certification training to quality professionals who want to be the future leaders of business excellence and risk avoidance.

We are dismantling paradigms of acceptable quality levels and “just” having satisfied customers. We are promoting the goals that no defect ever reaches a customer and customers that become advocates of your organization, spreading the messages of business excellence and risk avoidance.

My colleagues are also reality checks that keep each of us focused and on task. We see ourselves as viable contributors for years to come and each has a duty to be advocates and critics of each other.

Mu sunset career move is now underway. I have left a legacy of 13 books and courseware that can help others with their career progression. Those who seek enlightened lessons from the past will be the success stories of the future. For those who do not learn from history, they are destined to repeat the mistakes of others.

My hope for the end of my sunset journey is that I will be able to proclaim, “what a ride!”