If you read the Business Journal last week, you probably saw the special report 20 in Their 20s. We profiled 20 Angelenos, all still in their 20s, who started their own unique local businesses.
You couldn’t help but be struck by the enthusiasm, the confidence, the downright optimism bubbling up from those young entrepreneurs.
For example, one 27-year-old co-founder of a specialty PR firm in Sherman Oaks said: “It’s limitless where our company can go from here.”
That view of a boundless future is in sharp contrast to the dreary focus on limitations you tend to hear from older business people in Los Angeles today. A typical comment from a baby boomer: “The cutbacks are over at our business, but we’ve entered a period of permanently lowered expectations.”
Wait a minute. Doesn’t this seem wrong to you? Don’t middle-age business owners, with their “this too shall pass” attitude, usually seem more optimistic than young business owners, who typically seem insecure? Have we entered some topsy-turvy era in which the young now are the confident ones?
It turns out that yes, perhaps we have.
Last week, a colleague sent me an interesting survey of entrepreneurs by the small-business services unit of American Express. It said: “Typically, older entrepreneurs are more positive because they have lived through previous downturns and survived.”
But the survey results showed the opposite. It said only half of baby boomer entrepreneurs – 51 percent – described themselves as optimistic about their business’s immediate future. But a whopping 72 percent of generation Y, or those in their 20s, said they were optimistic.
So young business owners suddenly are more optimistic than their older counterparts. Why is that? Since the survey didn’t explain, I called and asked that question of Alice Bredin, the small-business adviser to the unit that did the survey.
She offered several theories, but the most intriguing one goes something like this: Young entrepreneurs today tend to do business in a profoundly different way. They are far more likely to use the Internet and connect with customers electronically, through social media and such. While older business owners still tend to view the Internet and its marvels as an adjunct or complement to their business, young ones view it as the business: It handles everything from marketing to management.
If you think about it, she said, baby boomers, those ages 46 to 63, have spent much of their lives building up their reputations and their businesses’ standing in the community by following the playbook. They sponsored the neighborhood little league team and joined the Better Business Bureau and made sure the planters out front had fresh flowers.
But suddenly, all that doesn’t seem quite as important. Successful business owners in generation Y, or those in their 20s, market through Facebook and sell over the Internet to anonymous buyers in distant lands.
In other words, older business owners who worked hard to be good Rotary Club officers are now watching the world turn its favor to those who are masters of Google Analytics and have the snappiest tweets.
And the recession, Bredin pointed out, has accelerated this evolution, the change from old to new. Recessions do that.
That may be why so many boomer business owners suddenly lack confidence. With the economy picking up, they feel they’re walking back onto their old familiar playing field, but this time the playbook has changed. They don’t quite get the new rules.
And those young guys on the other side of the field? They wrote the new playbook. No wonder the gen Y’ers feel emboldened. Their era is upon us.
As a boomer myself, all I can say is this: Don’t despair, boomers. You can get into this game. Sure, it’s a little foreign, but it’s like anything else new and different. You learn. You adapt. You ask for help. Eventually, you figure it out.
And that feeling that you don’t understand the new rules in this era that’s upon us? Well, this too shall pass.
Charles Crumpley is editor of the Business Journal. He can be reached at [email protected].
