I experienced a very full and rewarding career in manufacturing for 41 years. As I became eligible for retirement, I decided to reinvent myself and start a new career. Once I embarked on consulting, I realized that the actual practice required “practice” and the book learning was only the beginning. 

I attended a variety of classes with other beginning entrepreneurs and learned a series of new skills around technology, marketing, connecting, and developing my value proposition. My biggest struggle was with confidence. 

I also found that with almost complete freedom to structure my time, I was less effective. It was easy to get distracted and follow down different paths that didn’t really move me forward.

After many lessons, trials, and mistakes, I made the transition from manufacturing employee to Silver Entrepreneur. I am still on a journey, but I’m getting farther along down the road! In my experience, I have learned that there are four steps to becoming a Silver Entrepreneur. 

Step 1: Develop your Mindset - Own your voice, organize yourself to create a business, and be authoritative in your choices. 

Step 2: Create Your Value Proposition for an Expertise Business - Work on your teachable point of view and how you can create gains (and lessen pains) for your customer. You also need to sharpen your focus on your ideal customer and who would be the best fit for you and for them.

Step 3: Skills in People, Technology, and Business (Build or hire the Skills Sets) - Recognize that you may only need to develop 5 skills, and for a reasonable cost hire out the 5 other skills - You can easily have a virtual team at reasonable cost in today’s world.

Step 4: Create an Action, Practice, and Learning Plan for your personal and business development - Learn how to “practice” new skills - You have to figure out how to do deliberate practice on the skills you want to build. And then put a learning plan into place. 

 As you go on your journey, remember these four things: your platform helps amplify your voice, choose it well. Your performance is your business, develop your mindset and practice, practice, practice. Speaking of practice, always schedule in time for focused work. And lastly, be willing to be bad in the beginning. With time you can develop the skills you need to be a successful business owner.