We hear about all the young people making a big deal of their successes in their early years. Twenty-something tech gurus or entrepreneurs that make their fortune early.
Who here is past 45-50 and maybe made a switch or restarted and found success and a modicum of happiness in their new position?
I am fortunate in that I took a very niche applied science in university, and was successful in that career as an employee/consultant – geophysics. So I have high value, rare technical skills. I blew out my knee in the high arctic doing scientific surveys – so I decided to try to parley those skills into something where I could be my own boss. Fortunately I also picked up a business partner with a similar background (former coworker) who wanted to run the business side of the business.
During COVID I started an equipment business to provide the required specialty tools to other geophysicists – things like ground penetrating radar and such. There was exactly one business already operating in this space in Canada, so there was room for a second player. It’s a high capital business – I’m basically taking the capital risk of buying rare equipment and spreading it out across the continent. (People don’t want to buy a $50k device to use for a week.) But it was a huge risk – I have one business partner, and we both wagered out houses on the startup loan. We’re past the hump now and our revenue is directly funding growth, so huzzah! (It took six months to get our first client – but now it’s about six hours between clients, without having to do any marketing bullshit.) I have real world hands on experience with all the gear and am not just a sales robot, which keeps everyone coming back for advice, opinions, networking, and we are growing by word of mouth.
My boss is a hardass though. ;)
Buy your boss a tropical island vacation
The side effect of running your own business, but not being large enough to hire a bunch of people yet – if you take a holiday, the business just stops for that period. We can’t do that, so no holidays. On call 24/7 essentially (although more realistically, I average about 60 hours per week.)
There are chicken and egg problems involved in getting that holiday. We need an employee to cover the shop, but the income needs to be high enough to afford their salary (they need to be a technical specialist like me). So I need to get to about an 60-80 hour work week to justify the employee and then find someone with the same super niche skills, and then spend a bunch of time on knowledge transfer. Ideally, they want to buy in so they’re becoming part owner, but that makes it even harder to find an employee.
So, hopefully I’ll get a vacation within a year or two…
Find customers where you want to vacation
Or do a “staycation”. Check in to a local hotel when there’s a long weekend.
In any case, hard work will pay off.