Not All Boomers are Living Only for the Day

I have been kind of rough on us baby boomers over the past couple of weeks. It seems that we are not planning our family business succession very well. Also, some of us are looking to entrepreneurship as a quick fix for our poor retirement planning.
However, a recent survey on small business and retirement planning conducted by the NFIB cuts us a little slack in all of this. It finds that most baby boomer entrepreneurs have given considerable thought to their retirement. Interestingly, nearly half (46%) intend to never fully retire.

Education in Action

One of the things that makes teaching entrepreneurship so enjoyable is that it is a “full contact sport.” That is, to teach entrepreneurship effectively requires finding ways for students to put the knowledge we offer them into action. We can do that through how we teach our classes and through the co-curricular experiences we can offer our students that lets them take their learning out of the classroom. One of my students, Tyler Oban, sent a link to his blog site where he has found that this is catching on throughout all of business education.

More Evidence of Job Growth in Small Business

Inc.com offers a preview of its Inc 500 issue coming out in November. What they found in this year’s list is more evidence of where jobs are being created.

The businesses that made Inc. magazine’s 24th annual list of the country’s fastest-growing private companies…together generated some 25,180 new jobs last year alone, up a full 35% on a year-over-year basis. They’re also planning to add 17,000 more jobs in the coming year.
By contrast, Fortune 500 companies lost jobs on average between 2001 and 2003, before rebounding by just 1.3% in 2004.
Since being founded, this year’s Inc. 500 companies together created more than 95,000 jobs.

Although this list is a self-nominated list, it still offers a remarkable snapshot of the entrepreneurial economy.

Baby Boomers Not Planning Family Business Succession

Last month I wrote a post about baby boomers looking to entrepreneurship as a magic wand to fix their lack of retirement planning.
Well now a study reported in Inc.com seems to show that baby boomers who are already entrepreneurs and have created family businesses are not much better at planning:

Accounting firm Kreischer Miller surveyed 3,000 family-owned businesses and found that almost all expect to keep ownership and management within the family through the generations. However, only half have a formal plan in place to identify and train family members to take the reins once founders retire. Many families neglect to train, mentor, and groom future family executives. What’s more, only one-third have non-family members on their board of directors, an arrangement which often ensures that the best qualified family members are chosen to lead.

Your Comments

The people who run my blog have been trying to deal with the mass of spam that all blogs face. An unfortunate outcome of this is that many of your comments have been inadvertently filtered and have not even made it to me for approval. For this we apologize! They hope to have this fixed soon.

Some Thoughts on Competition

We have been following Jason as he prepares to open his coffee shop in Bozeman, Montana. Today he ponders the competition he will be facing in the market.

I think there are answers to the question of competition. I think it is healthy. It keeps us on our toes and makes us be unique and different. Yes, we all want to make money and stay opened but I think there is room for that in this market in Bozeman.

Jason offers an important perspective on entering a competitive market. Rather than dismiss or even ignore your competition, you need to look at your competitors honestly and then take them on with a clear vision of what will make your business successful.

Greenspan on the Power of Free Markets

Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan offered a compelling assessment of the importance of economic flexibility in his remarks before the National Italian American Foundation yesterday.

Being able to rely on markets to do the heavy lifting of adjustment is an exceptionally valuable policy asset. The impressive performance of the U.S. economy over the past couple of decades, despite shocks that in the past would have surely produced marked economic contraction, offers the clearest evidence of the benefits of increased market flexibility.
We weathered a decline on October 19, 1987, of a fifth of the market value of U.S. equities with little evidence of subsequent macroeconomic stress — an episode that hinted at a change in adjustment dynamics. The credit crunch of the early 1990s and the bursting of the stock market bubble in 2000 were absorbed with the shallowest recessions in the post-World War II period. And the economic fallout from the tragic events of September 11, 2001, was moderated by market forces, with severe economic weakness evident for only a few weeks. Most recently, the flexibility of our market-driven economy has allowed us, thus far, to weather reasonably well the steep rise in spot and futures prices for oil and natural gas that we have experienced over the past two years. The consequence has been a far more stable economy.

Markets will always be more effective than any bureaucrat, no matter how well-intentioned, in providing economic growth and stability.
(Thanks to Ben Cunningham for this link).