Heir Apparent: How To Silently Take Over Boomer Business in 5 Steps
(Originally posted to the Jamie McSloy Blog on the 5th August, 2023.)
There’s a lot of angry talk about and from the Boomer generation. Generational warfare is mostly a PSYOP, and getting trapped in it is a waste of time. Let me give you the cliff notes so we can get to the good stuff:
The Baby Boomer generation, biggest in history. Millennials, another big block. Generation X; irrelevant, poor souls mostly trapped in the middle with no anticipated economic or voting strength to manipulate. Generation Z; the Zoomers and whatever the younger teenagers are now; not really a concern to anyone at this time as their economic and political power won’t come into focus for ten years or so.
That’s the global level of the problem.
Let’s talk about what we can do.
1: The Sun Sets On The Boomers
The Baby Boomer generation is massive and they have a lot of political and economic sway. They’ve managed to horde the wealth of the various booms and bubbles and now comprise a massive voting block that continues to benefit from the vast resources that have been built during their working lifetimes.
Not only that, they generally are working longer, own a larger part of the economy – through businesses and/or through stocks, investments, and pension programs – than any generation in history really has done.
They also hold a disproportionate amount of real estate, which is where a lot of the griping comes in.
We aren’t here to gripe though.
The sun will set on the state of affairs I’ve described above; the average Boomer is hitting retirement age within the next few years if they haven’t retired already. Pensions will be cashed out one way or another. Real estate will be sold. Businesses will be sold, broken up, or otherwise passed on.
Where there’s change, there’s crisis and opportunity.
2: Crisis
It’s not controversial to say that all of the above coincides with various crises that we’re facing in the West (and thus everywhere.) This blog post isn’t a doom-and-gloom one, so we won’t go into detail.
But the issue we’re talking about here; pensions crises, increased care, inheritance taxes, legacy businesses going kaput, not being able to replace native workers without immigration, and, most consequentially, everything being bought up by faceless dystopian corporocrats and you owning nothing; it’s all tied in to the generational switch that’ll occur when the Boomers finally ride off into the sunset.
Hopefully on their own terms and into a happy retirement.
Now, these crises aren’t scary bedtime stories to keep you awake; they are, ultimately, what you’re fighting against when you want to succeed. To put my own narrative moralising on it; they’re also what we’re fighting against if we want the world to look more like something human and less like something cyberpunk.
So, let’s start talking about what to do about this.
3: Opportunity
The Boomers are going to retire and they are going to sell their stuff. Again; no generational warfare permitted here; I hope they get to go out on the best terms available to them.
But everyone’s time comes and the opportunities are there to be taken.
This post, prompted by a handful of synchronicities this week:
- A reader on Twitter shared an old blog post of mine about Finding Good Mentors. In that post, I describe my process for finding cranky old guys and learning from them.
- One of my mentors, (found in the ways linked above,) had a big old crowdfunding campaign, which generated £16,000 in one week. I watched intently.
- That same mentor talked elsewhere about having health issues. I listened intently.
- I found another mentor for another thing entirely; an older man who is looking for someone to apprentice in the obscure thing that he does for the event that he can no longer do it at some point in the future. I’ve written to him about this.
- I started work on a new project – copying precisely something that the first mentor above does – that’ll probably be a going concern for the rest of my life and decades after it.
All of those things combine into something I talked about before on the blog; there are a ton of businesses, skills, cultural heritage pieces and so on, that are for the most part the province entirely of older generations. Generations who have worked out how to do them, what works, what doesn’t.
In some cases, they’ve made a fortune as well. That’s not really the point, but I know many readers want to hear it.
Both of the guys I mentioned above are incredibly successful. The first has a business that makes, I’d estimate, close to the seven-figure mark per year. It’s a two-person business ran by he and his wife. He’s 73, she’s 63.
The second man I mentioned doesn’t have a business per se. He sold his main business a few years ago for, according to him, “many millions.” He now writes books and is a scholar of his subject for its own sake. He’s 70.
Now…
As a younger person, (and I’m not that young, but both of these men started their profitable businesses older than I am now,) you can struggle and find your own path, and there’s an element of that in whatever you do.
But the other way is that you simply take what someone else is doing – in this case, you see what an older generation are doing – and get started, and wait.
4: Heir Apparent
Most want fast riches, but wealth accumulates like a rolling stone.
In today’s cultural ecosystem, the above is compounded by the fact that youth is absolutely held up as a virtue in-and-of-itself and, more pressingly, everyone seems to want to start off as a master and not have the apprenticeship period.
The good thing about ignoring all of the above temptations is that you simply copy exactly what’s been done. Maybe you move a bit faster, maybe you listen to your old mentor and avoid the mistakes that they did.
Then you wait.
You ask questions of your mentor with full honesty. “Hey… what would you do in this situation,” or, “You do this… I’ve planned on doing something similar, is my plan OK?”
The torch doesn’t get passed on – although it can do – but in this metaphor, we’re lighting our own torch and feeding it with the knowledge someone else accumulated.
5: Stay The Course And Don’t Be Dumb
If you can get your head around the idea that it’ll take time and that it will work in the end, really, the only enemy is yourself.
And, through years of personal experience and watching other people somehow manage to be even stupider than I am, there’s a big change you will be your own worst enemy.
Like you’ll get an ego. Or you’ll stop. Or you’ll try and find the shiny object or abandon things that work for things that don’t.
This is really long for a blog post. It’s really, really long for a modern blog post where the average person skips a TikTok video because it’s forty-five seconds long, so I’ll leave it there. We’ll talk about the ego traps some other time.
Final Thoughts
Let’s summarise:
- Many business owners are about to retire
- As the largest generation drops out of the working world, massive upheaval follows, (we’re seeing a lot of this now)
- Where there’s crisis, there’s opportunity; take the mantle from them
- Take what’s working for them, modify it to the new conditions, and trust the course
- Don’t mess it up
That’s a very simple plan, and it’s one I’m attempting to follow on multiple fronts. It’s low competition when compared with the current in-thing – whatever that may be – and it’s something you can already look at the track record for.
P.S. I’m not at the wise old mentor stage yet, but the launch of The Vault is finally imminent. Inside it, you’ll be able to pick my brain with the monthly Question and Answer session as well as learn my systems for navigating life and succeeding in online business while you’re at it.
Check back in a few days and join up.