Starting a business at any stage of life comes with its own challenges, but middle-aged entrepreneurs have one significant advantage—experience. Whether you’ve spent decades mastering a trade or managing teams, your background provides a strong foundation for launching a successful business.
Play to Your Strengths
No matter their age, one of the biggest mistakes new entrepreneurs make is jumping into a business or industry they know nothing about. Yes, passion is important when starting a business, but expertise is essential. Your professional background allows you to be competitive in areas where you already have knowledge, credentials and a network. Middle-aged entrepreneurs should focus on business opportunities that align with their skill set rather than chasing a trend or industry they know little about.
Order Fulfillment vs. Order Acquisition: Where Do You Fit?
The next step is determining if you will be an order fulfillment business or an order acquisition business.
- Order fulfillment businesses focus on delivering high quality work to their clients. Examples include CPAs, contractors, or specialized service providers who may rely on word-of-mouth or targeted outreach to get customers.
- Order acquisition businesses are driven by sales and client relationships, and thrive on networking, pitching and bringing in new business. These business owners are often better at closing deals than performing the actual services, meaning they may need to build a bigger team to deliver the results they want.
Most small business owners are naturally dominant in one area or the other. The big challenges come when they try to do both. Consider your strengths and where you will excel at bringing in business.
Finding Your Best Client Acquisition Strategy
Even if you’re focused on order fulfillment, every business needs a way to attract clients. As a small business owner, you likely don’t have the time or resources to test 20 different marketing strategies. Instead, ideally you can find one highly effective method that brings in your ideal clients. This could be:
- Leveraging your professional network — Tapping into past colleges, industry connections and referrals.
- Industry specific marketing — Investing in LinkedIn, networking events or strategic partnerships.
- Word-of-mouth and reputation building — Providing exceptional service turns happy clients into your best advocates.
The key isn’t to just attract any clients—it’s to find good clients. The wrong clients can drain your time, energy and resources, whereas the right ones will appreciate your value and contribute to your long-term success.
Experience Is Your Greatest Asset
Middle-aged entrepreneurs offer something that young business owners can’t—years of experience, industry knowledge and professional relationships. Playing to your strengths allows you to build a business that thrives.
At Dunn CPA Firm, we specialize in helping entrepreneurs structure their businesses for financial success. If you’re thinking of starting your own venture, book a free consultation. Let’s create a plan that works for you.
You know, honestly, book that free consultation with me for just as fast as you can, uh, and I can, can, can help, uh, help you do that. Um, um, it’s all about your, your education. Your certification licensing, um, your experience and your, your motivation and passion. That’s really what it’s all about. It’s understanding that, um, it’s, it’s, uh, if you’re an electrician, you got a pretty good shot at maybe becoming an electrical subcontractor if you’re CPA, probably not going to make very good electrical subcontractor.
And I know that sounds pretty basic, but I can’t tell you how many people come. Come into my office if you were thinking about doing business that they have absolutely no experience with at all. So, um, some of the, um, the other tips is it then once you kind of begin to figure out, uh, those opportunities, those seeds of business owner opportunities at your feet or in between your toes, it quickly becomes.
A identification of are you going to be an order fulfillment type of business or an order acquisition type of business primarily because small business owners are almost always way more dominant one or the other. If they have to do both, it’s kind of the kiss of death because it’s, it’s just too much for a small business owner.
So, uh, But, you know, are you, you know, what are you like? Are you more of a people person and, you know, uh, better at relationships than actually following through and doing work? Well, then you need to be maybe more of an order acquisition type of business. Or, or you like a CPA, like myself, um, you know, who’s really good at getting the work done.
Um, and so our business here is mostly order fulfillment, and yeah, I still have to be able to get clients, but that’s 5 percent of the, of the practice, not 95 percent of the practice. So that’s a, a pretty, pretty, pretty big tip. Um, the other thing, um, when you do figure that out, Yes, and you still have to get work.
How you get work is, as a small business owner, is typically just a rifle shot type approach. You don’t have the money. The resources to, to, to have 20 different ways of getting business. So the key to one of the keys is, uh, to being successful is to find the one way that, um, you can use to get good clients, not, not just any client, but the good, so the good customers.
So, um, all kinds of steps as you, you go down this process.
