Market Optimization Is the Way to Boost Your Late-Career Startup

What’s vital in this process is defining your company’s mission, goals and values in advance.

An employment crisis for older workers is looming. We are facing an upheaval in work options like no other in our lives. We can’t wait for the cavalry. It’s not coming. How you position yourself for what’s coming — how you optimize your position in the market — will be critical to how you live through it.

We need to create independent platforms for generating work and income on our own terms. A late-career small business of your own may be just the right solution for you. If you are considering your own small business, there are ways you can plan resiliency into your model. Ask yourselves: How can we be proactive and position ourselves to take advantage of as many options as we can? You need to create your own solutions, ones that have value to the communities and markets you love. You need to incorporate market optimization.

But what is market optimization, and how do you build it into your startup? Market optimization is the work you do to make yourself known to the world as a vendor of services or goods that advance the goals you set for your company. What’s vital in this process is defining your company’s mission, goals and values in advance. Without these in place, your market optimization efforts will be wasted on chasing immediate fears and short-term fixes. Remember, you get to decide the real purpose of the work you do. You create a mission, values and goals around that purpose and then use the results to navigate your way into the market. You get to decide what good you bring to the world.

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