twanless

Layer If You Want The Whole Cake

Lay­er­ing is a mar­ket­ing tech­nique that moves new clients through an extended sales process and allows them to pick what they need from you. A ver­sion of this post was pre­vi­ously pub­lished in the Finan­cial Post Entre­pre­neurs who make the tran­si­tion from cor­po­rate worker to inde­pen­dent busi­ness oper­a­tor invari­ably face one major hur­dle that hob­bles their...

twanless

Mentor For Rent: The Older Independent’s Value Proposition

Older inde­pen­dent pro­fes­sion­als can’t com­pete against younger peo­ple on speed, idea gen­er­a­tion, and tech­nol­ogy under­stand­ing. But they can stand out if they apply their wis­dom and ana­lyt­i­cal skills and rein­vent them­selves as hired men­tors. Many years ago, while train­ing in project man­age­ment,  I under­took a role-playing exer­cise in cor­po­rate...

twanless

Experience Doesn’t Make You An Entrepreneur

When they begin inde­pen­dent busi­nesses, older skilled peo­ple have a wealth of valu­able expe­ri­ence in their par­tic­u­lar spe­cialty. But that expe­ri­ence can also lead to a some­times arro­gant belief that they know every­thing there is to know. They don’t. An info­graphic from Con­tactMe, the soft­ware peo­ple, points out that the aver­age age of entre­pre­neurs ...

twanless

Reinventing Your Career As An Independent 2: Managing The Business

In the last post, we men­tioned that one of the best things you can do when going inde­pen­dent is to learn how to run an entre­pre­neur­ial busi­ness. Now we’ll explore that through the lens of the tra­di­tional grid of man­age­ment functions. Strat­egy. Most peo­ple think this means writ­ing a busi­ness plan. It doesn’t. A busi­ness plan, while con­tain­ing some strate­gic aspects,...

twanless

Your Aging Brain Is A Competitive Strength

Mid-life entre­pre­neurs have a dis­tinct advan­tage because their brains are better. If you have fled the cor­po­rate straight-jacket for your own entre­pre­neur­ial pro­fes­sional busi­ness, you’ve prob­a­bly wor­ried often how you’re going to keep up with all those young hot­shots out there. Maybe you saw glimpse of that in your old work­place. For 20 years you toiled in the...