At what age are entrepreneurs more likely to be successful as founders?
I answered this question on my own blog series … pulling on an extract from within Guide 01 of the Five-Year Entrepreneur series:
What is the right time in your life to start a professional services company?
This is, of course, a question only you can answer, but if I had to give some steers, I would say that there is a danger of going too early if you have:
- Insufficient grounding, and/or qualification, in the professional service area you seek to provide (obvious hopefully);
- A very limited professional network – both in terms of potential future clients and colleagues to join you;
- No experience of business development (selling) and business operation.
In such a place, you may be better planning in a few deliberate ‘stepping stones’. Make your mistakes on somebody else’s payroll, get the ‘Big Firm’ tick on your CV, start to build your contact list, read some more. Conversely, there is a danger of leaving it too late if you:
- Are in danger of losing the appetite for the ‘hard miles’ required; you need a good five to seven years of fairly high octane energy left in the tank;
- Are too set in your ways; the entrepreneurial journey requires real flexibility, a hunger to learn new skills and this might not come readily to the cynic who feels ‘they have seen it all before’;
- Are gradually losing your nerve and starting to fear failure too much. Some subscribe to the bank account analogy of risk taking. That is we all get given (by nature of our disposition, upbringing etc) a certain amount of ‘courage tokens’. As we cash them in over the course of our lives, so our balance (or appetite for risk) reduces.
As I touch on later, this ‘sweet spot’ (the space between these two poles) tends to start around the early to mid-thirties when you will have acquired sufficient professional skills, experiences, gravitas and contacts but also have a real hunger and energy to be successful. There are, however, absolutely no ageist rules here. Of course, a certain minimum level of skill and experience is necessary (such that the market would be prepared to pay for your time/expertise) but, beyond this, the right mindset and attitude can overcome most other challenges.
As I have said before, don’t feel you need to be the complete article before you ‘press go’ either. If you are waiting for this, it will never happen.
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To download Guide 01 (from which a number of these blogs have been extracted) for FREE see here.
For more details on the Five-Year Entrepreneur Guide series or the three-day retreats for entrepreneurs facilitated by Dom twice-yearly see here.
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