"No money, no skill, just a tiny bit of an idea and its good for salarymen, office ladies, students, and seniors."
The book in the picture is the￥10,000 Startup, a 2015 Manga-style, Japanese language translation and adaptation of a very successful book published in English in 2012 by Chris Guillebeau, a fellow Portland resident, best-selling author and life-long micro-entrepreneur. The translation of the banner on the cover, "no money, no skill, just a tiny bit of an idea and it’s good for salarymen, office ladies, students, and seniors", immediately caught my eye. Those words could be the first sentence of my call to arms to anyone in the 50Plus demographic worried about a potential coming shortfall of their financial plan resulting from our unexpected good fortune of living longer than expected.
In a recent blog post, I made reference to current data from BlackRock, the largest asset manager in the world, to estimate the size of the problem facing the 50Plus demographic. The answer: the average Baby Boomer (75 million of the 110 million 50Plus demographic) in the US is likely to fall $36,350 per year short of their own estimate of a $45,500 annual income goal given that they currently have only $136,200 in retirement assets shown in Figure 2. The question stands, can this hurdle be cleared?
Figure 2: from BlackRock Global Investor Pulse Survey July/August 2015
Clearing a $36,350 annual hurdle is achievable for an individual with experience, knowledge, talent and a willingness to work—the key traits of the average 50Plus individual. Chris’ original, English-language version of his book entitled The $100 Startup used the subtitle, "Reinvent the Way You Make a Living, Do What You Love, and Create a New Future", a perfect phrase to complete my call to arms to my 50Plus brethren. Chris was presenting the case for "micro-business" creation based on "micro-entrepreneurship". My only explicit additive would be a simple catalyst: understanding of the power of the Internet to reach almost any other human being on the planet with an offer. That is the basis of success for many "micro-entrepreneurs " today.
In December 2013, I wrote a blog post entitled “Goal: Job Creation - Scalable Startups vs Micro-Entrepreneur Training.” The $100 Startup was one of three books I referenced. The primary target for the post was my class of millennial students at the School of Visual Arts in the MFA in Design for Social Innovation program. I was using the $100 Startup and Be a Free Range Human - Escape the 9 to 5, Create the Life You Love and Still Pay the Bills, by Marianne Cantwell, to explain the difference between entrepreneurial ventures aimed at launching "scalable" startups, requiring significant financial investment, contrasting them with the "micro-business" model needing, as the Manga translation says, "no money, no skill, just a tiny bit of an idea". Clearly, the first two books carried the micro-entrepreneurship message. The third book I cited was The Startup Owner's Manual by my friend Bob Dorf and his partner Steve Blank which emphasized the “lean” approach to building scalable startups.
A secondary target for the original blog post was government economic development officials. Besides teaching at SVA, I was acting as a consultant to the State of Connecticut’s Department of Economic and Community Development on the creation of a more entrepreneur friendly “innovation ecosystem” in the state. The marching orders of these folks in CT, and elsewhere, is to stimulate the creation of, or the import of, jobs, jobs and more jobs, preferably in fast growing industries. In my experience, when the question of how to do this comes up, the answer reflects economic developer's fondest dream, “we need a Facebook, a Google, an Apple, another Priceline (a CT company), some true high growth companies in this geography. We only need one or two to solve a lot of our job problems”. When pressed as to what they really wanted, the answer in CT was often "just take me to the NY Tech Meetup (where I was active in the Leadership Circle), introduce me to some of your friends and help me steal a few young scalable growth companies".
Lots of public money gets spent trying to seed or create the “conditions” for high growth companies based on the fantasy: they will create the lion's share of the missing jobs. I was challenging this thinking in my 2013 blog post by asking, "why not experiment with some portion of economic development funds by training people to create their own jobs by building micro-businesses"? I pointed out that entrepreneurship is not a genetic trait, it can be learned. Case studies like those in Chris' $100 Startup, Marianne's Be a Free Range Human or about friends of mine who have done it are the best way to teach it. The goal of my challenge: track how many individuals can create their own “jobs” as micro-entrepreneurs by leveraging their existing knowledge, skills and talents mostly via an effective use of the Internet. 50Plus individuals are the perfect test cases for this experiment today. I strongly believe that the “job market,” jobs created by others, especially by "high growth" companies, are not going to be the safety net for the 50Plus demographic. We must experiment. Let's explore the real power of micro-entrepreneurship to understand how it "scales".
This series of posts on the 50Plus demographic has been leading up to the launch of a new website, which I am almost ready to reveal. Historically, I built scalable startups but never a true micro-business. My mission is to build a micro-business in full view, demonstrating to the 50Plus demographic how to leverage one's knowledge, talent and experience, in my case as a serial entrepreneur, mentor and teacher. My goal is to help as many members of the 50Plus demographic as I can create their own jobs. I am not without my own role models. I have been following some carefully over time. They happen to be millennials and young Gen X'ers, folks like Chris Guillebeau, Pat Flynn, Marianne Cantwell and others who took the plunge and figured this out at different points in the last decade and are still doing extremely well. I will hopefully introduce you to some of them along the way. Their stories are amazing. Ours can be too!
If you haven’t done so already, subscribe to my e-mail list to receive notices of my remaining posts in the 50Plus series on this website and the announcement of my new website. I look forward to serving you and getting to know you in the process. Let's do this together!
