1896 – Maturepreneurship with Jannette Anderson

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0:58with us right now is Jeanette Anderson Jeanette you are known as the maturepreneur maverick your website is maturepreneur.world Jeanette thank you so much for joining us hi Josh I'm so happy to be here yeah writing up the whole screen in the room so like you're already made my day. Well, thank you. Well, listen, I am really grateful for the message that you share, because I believe that there is a very devoted audience that finds themselves in. Well, I'll tell you what, we'll even include the the young, sprightly 50, 60, 70 year olds. How's that? Exactly. And they are. So, yeah, that's there's this whole new world coming.

1:44And surprisingly, no one's paying attention. And so I am the, you know, on my soapbox about that. So people don't miss this incredible opportunity. Yeah, well, I believe it has never been easier for someone who has gained a lot of professional experience, you know, they've had a very maybe successful career corporate run, and maybe they've developed enough skills and or, you know, they they're at the stage, maybe they've got some savings. Now they want to decide, you know what, I don't want to have to wait until I'm 70 years old to retire. Like I want to start easing into that life and maybe work less or work on my own terms or travel and work.

2:27And in my current corporate job, I don't get that. And I believe that there's maybe some sort of happy medium, right? Where I don't have to cut the umbilical cord and just, you know, sit around all day and putter. I actually am very good at what I do. I love doing what I do. And now I want to do more of it. But, Jeanette, they want to do it on their own terms. Help us out. Well, you know what? I call it the rise of the maturepreneur. And what's happening is literally millions and millions and millions of baby boomers and late Gen Xers are coming into the entrepreneurial marketplace. And like I said, no one's actually paying attention because this demographic is largely invisible, undervalued, and completely underserved.

3:10So like you said, in many ways, it's never been easier. But for that demographic, it's actually quite hard. Because especially as women, we have to fight the invisibility factor. Literally, I have experiences, Josh, of, and I'm not a very invisible person, I have blue hair and polka dot glasses. And, you know, I tend to be pretty visible in the world. And I was in business situations where I literally was invisible and completely ignored. And I was shocked by that when it first happened and impinged on me four years ago. I was kind of like, huh, okay, ageism is not just a notional thing. It's a real live thing where literally people were talking to me, asked me what I did.

3:55I'm mid-sentence answering them and they turn and start talking to someone else. And that happened not once, but twice in a row. that doesn't feel good yeah no kidding and I was just not used to that you know at first I thought it was just that guy being rude and then when it happened the second time I was like okay they can't all be dead maybe it's me maybe I'm not showing up and no I was actually showing up very present and started to watch and every woman over 60 was literally completely ignored and and so that got me curious okay what's really going on here the more I investigated the more I really started to understand that there's a lot of misconceptions.

4:33Like you said, perhaps they have some savings. Some do, but our society is trained that we retire at 65 and typically we used to die at 70 or 75. So we work around a long time. So most people do not have the income and or retirement savings they need to live 20, 30, 40 more years, nor do they want to golf and knit for 20, 30 or 40 more years. Like you said, they've still got lots of contribution left in them. So my hashtag and mission and tagline is hashtag not done by a long shot, because these people are not done. No, my goodness. And let's talk about, you know, let's say that there's a leader listening, and they have a few people on the team that, let's say, exceed them, you know, age wise.

5:25And talk about for a moment, maybe some of the how leaders can kind of reach that what may be on or under tapped or underutilized talent and or wisdom and experience. I mean, I know even in my youthful age, you know, still as many decades as I've worked professionally and worked with people, like I am just not the same person I was in my 20s and 30s. Now, that's not to say that there were maybe some advantages that I might bring to the table as a 20 something year old. I would still, in terms of like me, let me just tell you, I am grateful for who I am today. Yeah, when I realize both how much wisdom or how much I do know, but also I would say, you know, how much I realize I don't know and that that humility that is actually grown with me as well.

6:26Absolutely. So there's a bunch of things you mentioned that I want to comment on. One of the things is that, yes, we do get more, not everyone, but we generally get more emotional intelligence as we age. And that plus experience is what wisdom ends up being, is that ability to correlate our inner game or our inner grounding with that external experience and expertise. and that creates wisdom, which is, and again, not every old person, older person is wise and not every young person is not wise, right? So I don't want to be making ageist generalizations, but in corporate America, good luck going back into the workforce if you're 68 or 75, because even though you have the ability and even though really statistically, you will likely be there longer than any millennial or gen z that they hire the reality is those people tend to change jobs every two years two and a half at most and a boomer and a gen xer are typically way more loyal they will be with you 10 or more years um even if they are older because that's their their culture that they grew up with and in terms of corporate speaking of culture one of the great benefits of hiring someone in the workplace that is older is that they do bring tremendous emotional intelligence.

7:51It's been shown statistically that the culture of an organization shifts to a much happier, more grounded, healthy workplace when there are older people employed there because they raise the level of emotional intelligence. So if your culture is suffering, which many companies are post-COVID, because of all the rampant changes and losses of people and so forth and so on, hiring older people will actually help you get back on track faster than if you were hiring younger people for so many reasons. So that's the workplace. And it's a challenge to get back in, because let's face it, that younger person is going to get paid less, but they don't bring the wisdom and therefore the productivity.

8:33So it's a real trade-off that that leaders need to think about more deeply. We're used to dismissing people who are 65 plus or even 50 plus and, and thinking they're done and they're not reliable and so forth. The opposite is actually the truth. And in terms of the entrepreneurial market, yeah, there's lots of opportunities like there is for everyone who wants to become an entrepreneur, but good luck getting a loan. If you're 72,

9:06good luck getting any VC capital or funding if you're 60 or 85 there's a lady in Calgary who just won an award for the top 8 over 80 and her app that she developed in the new technology company that she started won a global award for best app and she's 86 she could not get funding for her startup for love nor money but she's got an award-winning app and a multimillion dollar company now that she started at 82. So VCs and funders and banks and insurance companies overlook this demographic at their peril. Frankly, I wish they'd stop doing that. Yeah. So what you're saying makes sense to me, because obviously I think it would be immoral and certainly wildly inappropriate to say, okay, well, that person is of a particular race, so therefore I am going to discount what they have to say, right?

10:03Or they've got some sort of a physical handicap, so therefore I'm going to discount what they have to say. And I think a really good leader recognizes and looks for the strengths that diversity brings to the table. And I think any leader who doesn't seek for that and then they just try to put all the square pegs in around polls and everybody needs to be the same. That's not what a great team is comprised of, in my opinion. You want people that bring in, you know, here's our person's got really strong emotional intelligence. Here's someone who has four decades of experience in this field and is kind of seen and where they might, you know, again, not to stereotype, But let's say maybe, you know, they it's just someone who doesn't keep up on the latest trends.

10:53Right. But they know the principles so well that it's almost like these soft skills can apply to about anything that comes to the door. It's kind of like, you know, leading on values like, well, if we know what our values are, then decisions are quite easy, no matter what the vehicle or the technology is that we're looking at. But again, it's a good, getting back to my point, I think a great leader recognizes strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities there. And, you know, they want to utilize that really, really well. And Jeanette, one question I wanted to ask you, and you're welcome to address that if you like.

11:30But, you know, I think about as well, let's say consultants, coaches, service providers, agency owners that are independent, right? And as business owners, we may need professional services. And I got to tell you, this is my own bias, but I generally prefer hiring someone that's got some years of experience behind them. And I'm not saying that that necessarily means that they have to be in their 50s, 60s, but I prefer someone that's been in the industry for a little bit. That to me, like when I'm hiring a contractor or an agency like that, you know, I'd rather have tried and true rather than flashbang with, you know, magic in a bottle, promise, you know, over promises and maybe not enough experience to back it up.

12:17Again, I'm probably muddling too many metaphors in there, but do you get what I'm saying? Yeah, absolutely. I think you're right. There's balance on both sides. And really what we need to do is actually just check into that individual skills and abilities, because I believe, and I think there are some statistics, I know there are some statistics that back this up, that this generation is actually, and this cohort of entrepreneurs is actually going to create a tremendous amount of innovation. People think of older people as those who are not very current and, you know, on trends or technology, et cetera.

12:55And that is true for some. But there are also some. I've got a 76-year-old friend who can run circles around almost any tech whiz you give me, and certainly in the realm of video and video production, because she just loves it. And so she has geeked out on it for the past 10 years. So we need to stop thinking of people as a people and check in with that person. What are your skills and abilities? I think what a lot of older people bring to any role, whether it's consultant, workplace, you know, employee or entrepreneur is context. We've seen a lot of things. Now you can get people who are really stuck in the past, but they can be any age, right?

13:36And what they bring is context and the ability to look at the big picture more so than those that are in their 20s, 30s, and 40s. And again, most of this is not specifically age-specific. It's individual-specific, but there are trends and themes and so forth that we can look at and point to. There's this thing called the happiness you that they've done a tremendous amount of research on. And basically, the bottom line is we are our happiest as human beings when we're very young and when we're older. And when we are the most miserable is when we're in our 30 to 50s because that's when we have the most stress, the most challenges, the most that.

14:16And so we are happier, more balanced. And I got to tell you, it was my birthday two days ago. I'm 64 and I have never been more grounded, happy about my life, free from a lot of approval issues, you know, energized and juiced about my passion. And that's what you're going to find in a lot of older people now that we didn't have previously. And the reality is, surprisingly and distressingly, I don't know the statistic for the U.S. And I don't know where the stat came from. So don't, you know, don't count on it as accurate. But I said that 75 % of Canadians retire with less than$25 ,000. Yeah. I don't even know how you do that.

15:05You don't. You can't live here on that, right? That doesn't go very far. Yeah. And the U.S. is not very different, actually. We assume most people have the money to live on. And our governments are not, you know, they're funding. Well, I don't know about the U.S. government, but I assume it's very similar. They are funding the Canadian retirement fund out of deficit. In other words, they are making money in order to be able to pay those people. And so that's not going to last. It's not sustainable. So they must go into entrepreneurship. But the problem is there's no support for them. There's no platforms.

15:40There's no events. That's why I'm creating an event and a podcast and a membership and all of this stuff, because there isn't anything for this demographic. There's focus on aging. There's a lot of focus on retirement. But those events are about buying, getting your will done and buying your place in the senior's home and your burial plot and Viagra and all of that. It's all about retiring. I want to see events and conversations and publications about refiring because there's a lot of people who are doing that who are refiring rather than retiring. Your website, Jeanette, is maturefreneur.world.

16:23You have an event, you have a conference that's coming up. Can you share a little bit more about those of us who may know someone that would really benefit from association with you? Yeah, well, thank you. I appreciate that. It's coming up in September 2024, 26th and 27th in Calgary, Alberta. It is a conference, we call it unconventional convention. And really, it's speakers and trade show and entertainers and activities, coaches corner, podcast alley, where we'll be podcasting live. So love to have you come up and be one of the podcasters where people who are 55 plus basically come to find out how can they continue to contribute and make a meaningful difference and a magnificent living because they are, like I said, too inspired to retire.

17:16So that event we're creating, because like I said earlier, every event I have found so far is really about how do you go out to pasture? basically how you know there might be some travel stuff there might be lifestyle and wellness there's a little bit of stuff around you know how to stay vibrant but frankly the best way to stay vibrant is to stay contributing and to stay relevant that's how to stay healthy mentally and physically oh you better believe it your website Jeanette is maturepreneur.world Jeanette Anderson again you are the maturepreneur maverick Jeanette it's been great having you thank you so much for this conversation.

17:55Thank you, Josh. And thank you for providing such a great platform for entrepreneurs.

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