Being an entrepreneur can make many seniors hesitant to take the necessary steps toward success. It might make you feel unsure of yourself. But by developing the right mindset through consistent habits and implementing a good business strategy, you can find the motivation needed to become someone who takes action.
The drive to succeed isn’t an inherent trait that everyone is born with. It’s often something you have to work on developing. Money itself isn’t enough of a driving factor for most people, so you have to do everything in your power to position yourself for success.
Make Sure Your Goals Align with Your Expected Efforts
Whether you have a dream of owning your own online business as a second career or just bringing in additional income to be able to afford to do more of what you want, you’ll have expectations that go along with these.
In whatever niche or category your business is in, you need to be sure that your goals line up with the type and amount of effort that you expect you’ll need to put in. Some people get started in business and they have an expectation for the number of hours that they’ll need to work.
But their goals aren’t in alignment with that amount of time. Some things will require more effort than you might originally think. For example, a project you need to get done in order to launch a product could end up taking a week or two to complete (or sometimes even a month) when you expected it to take a couple of days.
If you’re someone who doesn’t want to work a lot of hours because you want this to be a side gig, then that could turn into an issue for you. Along with the number of hours you expect to work, you’ll also have to consider the earnings.
While there are some things you can do that require just a little time where you end up seeing a big return on that investment, not everything is like that. You might want full time earnings, but only desire to put in a few hours of effort each week.
That might not turn out the way you want it to. You have to figure out what exactly it is you want. You need to know up front what type of involvement you’re looking at putting into your business.
If you don’t want it to take a lot of your time or effort, then you need to figure out a routine that’s going to work best for you. How much interaction with others will you need to contribute – and what about the learning process?
You don’t necessarily have to pour a lot of hours into something all at once. But what you do have to do is to be consistent. Even taking small steps will allow you to reach the end of the journey at some point.
But if you have a hit or miss way of working on your business, you’re going to end up struggling to reach your goals. It’s not feasible to want to launch a business or a product if you already have an established business that hoards your time and expect that to happen overnight.
If your goal is to make more money just to supplement your income, that can mean different action steps than if you want to make more money just to do things like take the grandchildren to the zoo.
The more consistent you are, the more goals you’ll reach – and the more it’ll motivate you to keep going, because you will see success as a result of your efforts. Plus, being consistent will help you take yourself and your business seriously. You’ll start to think like an entrepreneur.
Surround Yourself with Action-Oriented Influences
If you want to become a success-driven senior, then the company that you keep matters. You need to make sure that you surround yourself with influences that can help you achieve your goals.
This means taking the step to find a mentor who has a similar vision and ideas. You want a person who has the same type of ethics that you have. You wouldn’t be happy if you found a mentor who thought it was okay to set up a business that practices scam techniques.
The type of mentor that you find can be someone famous. That doesn’t mean that you’ll be able to have a face-to-face meeting with this person, though there are some out there who will do mentorships.
You can find a mentor who may be famous for his or her mindset in business. Or it may be someone who’s well known in your niche because of their success. Look for someone whose business leadership or mindset you admire and study what this person has to say.
Do your research by reading the books this mentor has written on the topics you want to learn. You may want to surround yourself with influences like Tony Robbins. This motivational speaker helps people learn how to improve their lives.
He went from being a financially struggling young janitor to having a net worth of millions. But you don’t need to follow someone famous if you choose not to. You can find someone like an online blogger who’s created the kind of success that you want to have.
You can also look for a marketer that you admire who’s built a solid reputation and sees good sales figures. Or, you can seek out coaches and either follow them online to learn from them or even book a coaching session.
Many coaches offer a free discovery session. You can use this to see if you’re a good match or to get to know why they succeeded. Your mindset is your biggest business asset.
When following other people, it’s easy to look at what they have and what you don’t have. Maybe they have a supportive spouse or they have good health or they have a job that allows them the financial freedom to build a business.
But what you can’t do is compare your journey to theirs. That’s a quick way to end up discouraged and it keeps you focused on your own obstacles. If you stay mired in your obstacles, that’s all you’re going to see.
What you want to focus on is what motivates you. What motivates you might look different from what motivates someone else. You might want to strive to succeed in business because you want a nicer home.
Or, you want to help your spouse out during retirement when income drops or, you want to be able to travel or spend time and money on your family members. It could be something out of necessity or a luxury you’d like to enjoy.
Leverage Your Ability to Engage with Others
Many senior marketers mistakenly believe that the key to success is throwing a lot of money at ads or having the best graphics. While those things can certainly help you on the path to success, they don’t guarantee it.
What does make you more likely to succeed is building solid relationships with other entrepreneurs and customers. When you have solid relationships with these two audiences, your chances of success increase.
When it comes to networking, it doesn’t have to be difficult. Use the same skills that you used to build your previous career or that you use in everyday life when you want to build a friendship.
You can start by looking for bridges. These are things that you have in common with others and include mutual interests like favorite TV shows, hobbies, family relationships, pets and more.
For example, a fellow marketer on a social media site shares a photo of his pet poodle. You can respond in a comment with a photo of your own dog and talk about how much she loves treats or a certain toy.
By doing this, you started to create a connection that goes beyond business and helps this other entrepreneur see you as a person. When you’re building relationships with other entrepreneurs and your customers, you always want to stay authentic to who you are.
People can sense when you’re not being genuine, and this will make them avoid you online. You can be authentic by asking questions and helping others with the advice or quality recommendations that you give.
Ask thoughtful questions that allow you to learn more about your audience. For example, if you’re in the fitness niche, you might ask a question about when your audience’s favorite time is to work out or their favorite place to exercise.
As a bonus for you, you can use these answers to craft content later on. Networking is simply being active and involved online. You want to be where your fellow marketers and audience are.
This may mean that you create a social media presence on a few platforms. Connect with others on those platforms you’ve chosen by commenting on their posts or sharing things that are relevant or engaging.
You can also engage with others through comments on your blog. The people that visit your blog on a regular basis are looking to network with you and they enjoy having a conversation through the comments on your posts.
But you can do the same on videos that you or someone else has posted. These are often thriving, active communities and you do want to tap into them. Get involved in forums that are in your niche, too.
Share your expertise and ask questions. You can also network through emails, too. Every email you send or receive is a chance to grow your brand and influence others. When you’re actively engaging with others, this can create opportunities for you such as landing a joint venture partnership.
Or, it could increase your ability to recruit affiliates. Plus, the more active you are with networking, you’re more likely to build a bigger customer base. So many people fail to engage in any form of communication, that merely being active and involved will help you with branding and positioning.
Hone Your Skills and Know When to Let Go
Everyone has something that they’re good at and this can be leveraged into a business asset for you. Most of the time, you can tell what a strength is because you enjoy doing it.
It comes easy to you and the hours seem to fly by. Often, you don’t recognize your strength because it seems so easy to you. If that’s the case, look at what friends and family are always asking you to help with.
For example, maybe someone is always asking you for bookkeeping advice or help with their taxes. You can create an opportunity for yourself to become a virtual bookkeeper or create bookkeeping products such as a course on teaching others how to do what it is that you do.
You can better the skills that you have by taking courses, looking up tutorials, or by finding someone in the same skill set that knows more than you. You can follow or read about this person to learn from them.
You can also listen to podcasts done by others who have a higher skill level in the same skill that you have. Maybe you don’t know what you’re good at, but you do have things that you enjoy doing.
Maybe you’ve even made a hobby of it. It would be worth it for you to examine what you spend your time on to see if it’s something you would like to get better at. You can turn around and use what you learn to help grow your business.
You might discover that there are going to be things that you’re not good at, too. Yet, these things may still need to be done for your business to be successfully run. You may also find that there are things that you dislike doing.
But these things have to be done as well. You can spend time trying to figure out how to do them and it’ll take you longer. Or, you can force yourself to do what you don’t like. But in the end, this will make you dread that part of your business.
Studies have shown that when people dread something, they’ll often put off doing it or avoid it altogether. If you do that, your business will end up suffering because of it.
Instead of forcing yourself, learn how to delegate what you don’t enjoy or lack the skills to handle.
There’s nothing wrong with letting someone else handle parts of the business. These may be projects that absolutely have to get done. You may not have any skills with design, yet you’ve been trying to force yourself to create covers for the eBooks you’ve written.
You can hire someone else to create those for you. You may be working on a project and while you like some of it and you’re good at that part, you don’t like other portions of the project.
It’s okay to let someone else work on that project with you. If you find that something isn’t working – such as you’re trying to advertise by spending money on Facebook ads, but you’re not seeing an increase in revenue or customer signups in return – it’s okay to just stop and not worry about being involved with ads.
Use Failure as a Stepping Stool for Your Success
When the word failure comes up, most people see it as something to avoid at all costs. They’re afraid of failure because they see it as an end to something. But failure is only the end if it’s treated as such.
Only you can give failure the power to prevent you from succeeding. That’s because every time you experience a failure, you’re gaining wisdom. You’re learning valuable lessons in what didn’t work.
Failure is like a road sign that keeps telling you not to go a certain way. It can point you to the right way. Toward success. But in order to get there when you experience failure, you must have the right mindset.
That mindset is one that says you’re not going to give up and it causes you do double down on your determination to keep on going. Failure can be the proving ground for success.
You must have the discipline to analyze what went wrong. By examining what happened, you’ll find valuable clues that show you what step may have been missed.
Or it’ll show you what key components are necessary to add to a project the next time you get ready to launch.
Every time you fail, you have to look deeply at it. While you should always celebrate the wins because this helps propel you forward, and you should research failures, it’s okay to have a positive attitude about failure, too.
In fact, having the right mindset when you fail can become a stepping stool that lifts you up to success. Look at each failure you’ve experienced. Break it down. See if there were any issues present – such as not having the right resources, tools or skill level.
Look back to see if there were any warnings that you ignored. An example of this would be if you created a project and had others involved. The deadlines were always missed or there was a lot of stress during the project.
Another sign could be your gut instinct. Something just felt off, but you pushed through anyway and ended up with bad results. When you tear down the failure, look at the areas that could have been done better.
For example, to keep the project on time, you could have hired outside help when you got bogged down with pieces of the project that you weren’t sure how to do. By breaking failure down and examining what happened, you’ll gain knowledge you can use to improve. This will allow you to do better and lead you to achieving the end result that you seek.