PHILOSOPHY
(often younger family members) than to be receiving help themselves.
These facts alone should be enough to puncture the image of aging Canadians as complacent retirees, content to collect pension cheques and drive up health costs while the rest of society works to pay for it all. The reality is that in Canada today, a new job that’s just been created is more likely to be filled by someone 60-plus than by any other age category. According to a 2012 TD Economics Observation report, from the time the economic rebound began in 2009, fully one-third of new jobs have been filled by such oldsters even though that group only accounts for eight per cent of the total work force. During the same period, new employment for Canadians over 70 has increased by 37 per cent.
How are older Canadian workers able to pull off the apparent miracle of finding jobs in a climate that’s hostile to older workers? Not, note, by that disproved cliché of stealing employment from young people. They do it because these jobs are often created by the older workers themselves. A 2012 CIBC study found that of the half-million Canadians involved in start-up businesses and new entrepreneurial ventures, “by far the fastest growing segment” was the 50-plus age group. CIBC’s World Markets has predicted that 50 per cent of these entrepreneurs will still be in business in the year 2018. This projection wouldn’t surprise Vivek Wadhwa, vice-president of innovation and research at Singularity University. He and his team have found that twice as many successful American entrepreneurs are over 50 as under 25 and that twice as many are over 60 as under 20. The Silicon Valley myth that all 21st-century innovators are still wet behind the ears is just that: a myth.
Where does all this energy come from on the part of a cohort that’s supposed to be “winding down”? There are two reasons why older Canadians start businesses: they have to or they want to. In the first case, we’re setting out on our own because we’ve lost long-held jobs, need a continuing source of income but have trouble finding employment in the traditional labour market because of age prejudice. In the second, we start up new stuff because although we can afford to retire, we can’t imagine not putting our experience and drive and strengths to something, especially if we’ve always had the dream of being our own boss. It turns out that these third-act startups are a widespread new phenomenon throughout older populations in the Western world. Here are two examples, among many.
Wally Blume, 73, spent the majority of his professional life working for someone else in the dairy business, where he might have stayed, he says, if it hadn’t been for his boss coming up with the idea of a new ice-cream flavour – tomato. Blume promptly quit and started his own ice-cream company, Denali Flavors, with a flagship flavour of his own, Moose Tracks (chocolate and peanut butter, with no hint of tomato). Today, Moose Tracks sells $80 million worth of product an- nually on its own. In some locales, it outsells vanilla.
Then, there’s Carol Gardner, 69. In 1997, while nursing a broken femur and a broken heart (she’d just divorced her husband of 27 years), Gardner, who’d also been laid off from her job as an advertising director and was cash-strapped, got an English bulldog named Zelda. She entered a Christmas card contest held by a pet store to win free dog food for a year and won. The prize inspired her to start a greeting card company called Zelda Wisdom. Gardner started with 24 greeting cards. Within six months, she’d sold more than a million cards. (Sample copy: “Go braless. It pulls the wrinkles down.”) Today, she produces more than 200 licenced Zelda products, from calendars to children’s books. Sales are conservatively estimated at $50 million annually.
I feel a particular affinity for this new kind of older risk taker – Zoomerpreneurs, if you will – because I’m one of them. ZoomerMedia, including the magazine you’re reading, exists because when one long chapter of my working life ended, I couldn’t imagine not going on to the next. As president of CARP and ZoomerMedia, I consider the issue of aging a lot professionally but, personally, it rarely crosses my mind. As quickly as I register the fact of age, I tend to forget it, for the same reason that I tend to forget about birthdays. People who count them, I’ve noticed, get older faster. People who don’t stay younger. They also stay healthier, in more ways than one – both physically, as we pointed out in Chapter 12, and financially, as we’re pointing out today. The title of this chapter is I Am Zoomer, Hear Me Roar. That roar is now both physical and financial.
Society being what it is, maybe now we’ll finally be heard!