How can you beat the odds if you want to join the boomerpreneur boom and start your own company after 50? MONEY put that question to small-business experts and dozens of fiftysomething entrepreneurs for their best advice.
How can you beat the odds if you want to join the boomerpreneur boom and start your own company after 50? MONEY put that question to small-business experts and dozens of fiftysomething entrepreneurs for their best advice.
Before Deborah Kenny quit her job in 2001 to start a school for underprivileged youth in Harlem, her friends staged an intervention. They listed their concerns: She would run out of money, she'd lose her house, and, worst of all, as a new widow she wouldn't be able to adequately provide for her three young children. Kenny did not budge. "I felt like I would die if I didn't start this school," she says. Kenny found herself sketching out the plans for her new education program during meetings, the way others might doodle.
Hector Correa came to the United States seeking opportunities, and he's made it his personal mission to create them himself -- both here and back in Mexico.
As a regional director for Aflac insurance, Stephanie Ringer had built her Louisville sales team into one of the top in Kentucky. One of her secrets for keeping her staff motivated? Holding brainstorming sessions in a local meeting space called WorkShop. She found that the center -- with its whiteboards, comfy couches, and crazy toys like hula hoops -- fueled productive sessions. So when WorkShop's owners put the business up for sale in 2007, Ringer, then 46, decided to buy it.
Remember school lunches? Some of it was good -- the cookies, sometimes the pizza, mostly the items that would make any self-respecting nutritionist cringe. But in the past 15 years or so, schools have come under fire for serving a hot mess of carbs, salt, and too many trans fats.
In a presidential election year, the economy is sure to be the story, with plenty of numbers for detail and small businesses playing the main characters. But over the past 14 years, the Boston-based Initiative for a Competitive Inner City (ICIC) has collected 100 urban business success stories every year.
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