Sexy At 60(And Beyond)

Entrepreneurship may be thought of as a young person's game. In addition to the obvious financial risks, starting a business can take its toll on the owner's personal life, straining a marriage or family. People in their twenties and thirties may have fewer commitments and less to lose -- both financially and personally -- than their elders.

It makes more intuitive sense for younger people take on the incredible risk of starting a business. If it flops, they have more chances to start over.

It may therefore be surprising to learn that many people don't start their own companies until they are close to retirement age. According to a 2009 study by the Kauffman Foundation -- www.kauffman.org -- persons between the ages of 55 and 64 started businesses at a higher rate than any other age group.

These older entrepreneurs -- we may call them second-career entrepreneurs -- find themselves, somewhat ironically, at the cutting edge of business. For all the talk of the necessity for technology, innovation can take many forms. Success need not be measured (and in fact rarely is measured) in Twitter followers. Second-career entrepreneurs bring years of expertise to their fields. At their best, they contribute to the whole community while making a living for themselves.

One thing that separates older entrepreneurs from younger is the ability to plan ahead for their future careers as small business owners. That is, second-career entrepreneurs may have greater financial stability, which can allow them more leeway to start their ventures without taking on excess debt or risk.

Four older Tulsans who made this leap told UTW their stories of how and why they started their own businesses. The reasons for going into business may be different for second-career entrepreneurs. While everyone likes making money, these small business owners were more interested in advancing their fields or following their passions than younger entrepreneurs may have the ability to be.

The Inventor

Following a passion is especially apparent for Ron Cropek of Broken Arrow. Cropek, 73, was an inventor as far back as the 1970s. A construction worker, Cropek found that some materials he used were rectangular and some were circular. When it came time to connect these materials, he was at a loss for what to do.

So he began to make curb adaptors and ground spout adaptors for pipes to rectify the problem. At first, he didn't have any plans to market them. The adaptors were simply something to make his work a bit easier. "I started in the late '70s. I used to make them for myself," Cropek said. "I came up with an idea for how to make them. I have a little oven and some moulds here."

A few years later, he wondered if his employer might be able to sell them to construction workers in the same bind. "I went to a business I used to work for ... Southwest Irrigation ... back in the '80s and '90s. We used to sell them out of the store there," he said.

However, Cropek didn't go on his own until he retired in the 1990s. "When I retired, I started making them and selling them out of Tulsa and Oklahoma City," he said. "That way, the contractors that come in the store have something to use."

Waiting until he retired gave Cropek the necessary financial stability to go without pressure to turn a profit immediately. That is, Cropek never relied on the sale of the adaptors for his primary income. He was able to treat his business like a hobby he made money at. "I still make myself money. I've always used it to supplement my income ... and to help my grandkids for everyday expenses," he said.

Going into business after retirement allowed Cropek to adopt an entirely different philosophy from many business owners. He's not in it to make money so much as to keep busy and spend time with his grandchildren, who help him in his shop.

"I could have made this a bigger business," Cropek said. He just didn't want or feel the need to do so.

The time with his grandchildren is particularly important to Cropek because he believes the business helps instill a work ethic in them. "A lot of folks these days, let's just say they like the paycheck but they don't like to work," he said. He views his business RC Specialties as a contribution both to his field and to his family.

The Philosopher

Cheryl Wilson, 60, is a Tulsa-based psychotherapist in private practice who specializes in sexual abuse. Like Cropek, she had many years of experience in her field before she decided to go off on her own. A therapist since 1981, she began her career in Oklahoma City before spending 20 years in Fresno, Calif. In both places, she worked for private non-profits. "Then I came back to the Tulsa area and worked for Family and Children's Services," Wilson said.

The bug to go into private practice eventually hit her. "At various times I felt like I wanted to go into private practice," she said. However, she felt she wasn't established enough to do so. "In my field, you have to have a base of people who know your work and respect you to get referrals," she said. Her various cross-country moves held her back from her ambition.

Wilson said that her parents, who grew up during the Depression, instilled her with the desire for stability and an aversion for risk. This made her journey into entrepreneurship more psychologically difficult as she had to overcome the loss of security that a steady job and income provide.

As a result, Wilson took a long time before making the leap, which came in 1998, when she was in her forties. "I'm a frugal person so I'd been saving money for quite some time ... I looked at my savings and said, 'How long can I live on this without making a dime?'" she said.

She figured she could go for a year with no profit and decided to try out private practice. Fortunately, she was in the black by her fifth month. One thing that helped was her good relationship with her former employer, with whom she continued to work for the first several months. "At the very beginning I was able to take part-time work at Family and Children's Services," she said.

Unlike many younger entrepreneurs, Wilson didn't need to take out any loans and was able to completely self-finance her venture. "I was fortunate ... I'm turning 60 at the end of [September]. Now the big question is, 'How can I possibly be able to retire because I'm so busy?'" she said.

She talks about her decision to become an entrepreneur as part of her larger journey of self-discovery. "It was scary," she said of her first few months on her own. "The biggest challenge was facing my fears of whether I could do it."

A retreat helped Wilson overcome her fear of risk. "A friend told me about a program called Landmark Forum, in which you went to a weekend intensive workshop to basically identify goals in some area of your life [and to] learn the technology you needed emotionally to be successful ... I could finally see where my fears were coming from," she said.

This forms the backbone of the advice Wilson recommends for potential entrepreneurs who know their strengths but are worried about the risk. "I think for some people who have the skills and the abilities ... if they're not successful sometimes it is an emotional block, some fear they're facing," she said.

The Caffeine Addict

Dennis Sells, 64, loves coffee. He loves it so much he has an industrial coffee roaster in the garage of his Tulsa home, which also serves as headquarters for SF Bean. Here, Sells cooks and blends coffee beans to create the perfect flavor for every occasion. "I'm an artisan roaster ... I like to create things," he said.

Like Cropek and Wilson, Sells -- a native of Ponca City -- spent his early career working for other people. Unlike them, however, he worked in a completely different field. As a California-based UPS manager, Sells frequently traveled to Seattle and Portland on business. It was in these places that he fell in love with coffee. "Instead of hanging out in bars, I was hanging out in coffee houses," he said.

COURTESY OF RON CROPEK

Armed with an early retirement in 1995, he started a coffee shop in California. He set up a retail store in an office building, but he also kept a portable cart that he could take to events. "I put together a trailer" with different kinds of coffee and espresso, he said. He took this trailer to birthdays, weddings, and similar events in the San Francisco area. The area made an impact on him: it's the origin of the name of his current company.

After winding down those ventures, he moved back to Oklahoma in 2005. Last year, he decided to take another leap and incorporated a coffee bean wholesale company. He orders the green coffee beans and cooks them himself. His goal is to sell them primarily to restaurants, using "as many fair trade and organic [beans] as I can," he said.

Sells has big ambitions for his company. "I want to be able to do it all," he said. He has therefore had to line up investments, something neither Cropek nor Wilson have had to deal with in any significant way. Even though he's gone on his own before, Sells said the biggest challenge he's faced has been "getting financing and all that stuff."

The Caffeine Addict

Dennis Sells, 64, loves coffee. He loves it so much he has an industrial coffee roaster in the garage of his Tulsa home, which also serves as headquarters for SF Bean. Here, Sells cooks and blends coffee beans to create the perfect flavor for every occasion. "I'm an artisan roaster ... I like to create things," he said.

Like Cropek and Wilson, Sells -- a native of Ponca City -- spent his early career working for other people. Unlike them, however, he worked in a completely different field. As a California-based UPS manager, Sells frequently traveled to Seattle and Portland on business. It was in these places that he fell in love with coffee. "Instead of hanging out in bars, I was hanging out in coffee houses," he said.

Armed with an early retirement in 1995, he started a coffee shop in California. He set up a retail store in an office building, but he also kept a portable cart that he could take to events. "I put together a trailer" with different kinds of coffee and espresso, he said. He took this trailer to birthdays, weddings, and similar events in the San Francisco area. The area made an impact on him: it's the origin of the name of his current company.

After winding down those ventures, he moved back to Oklahoma in 2005. Last year, he decided to take another leap and incorporated a coffee bean wholesale company. He orders the green coffee beans and cooks them himself. His goal is to sell them primarily to restaurants, using "as many fair trade and organic [beans] as I can," he said.

Sells has big ambitions for his company. "I want to be able to do it all," he said. He has therefore had to line up investments, something neither Cropek nor Wilson have had to deal with in any significant way. Even though he's gone on his own before, Sells said the biggest challenge he's faced has been "getting financing and all that stuff."

Unlike Cropek, Wilson, and Sells, Bill Bartmann, 63, has been self-employed since he opened a law practice in Iowa in the mid-'70s. Also unlike the others, Bartmann's prior career made him one of the richest men in America. That experience armed him to start a new company in his early sixties.

In 1986, Bartmann founded Commercial Financial Services, a debt collection agency. A few years later, his net worth reached into the billions.

In 1998, Commercial Financial Services went under due to unauthorized transactions by a partner. (Bartmann was cleared of any wrongdoing). By the early 2000s, Bartmann was on the speaking circuit and no one would have blamed him for retiring quietly.

In 2010, however, he got back into debt collection. "Entrepreneurs never get out of the game. Age is absolutely immaterial," Bartmann said.

He founded CFS II, which purchases debt from creditors and attempts to collect it from debtors.

What sets CFS II apart from the competition, Bartmann said, is its ethical business practices. It never sues debtors. It doesn't call more than twice a day. It helps -- free of charge -- clients settle debt with other creditors. If they qualify, CFS II helps customers sign up for government assistance. "We realize that most people are decent, honorable people and would pay their bill if they could," he said.

Bartmann said treating people with dignity has proved successful. "[We have the] highest repayment rate in the United States ... higher than any other collection company in America because we treat our customers well," he said.

DYLAN SPAULDING

Bartmann has long been a critic of the debt collection industry. He said he believes competing companies treat debtors badly because they are afraid of change, not because of any problem with Bartmann's model. "They would rather do it in their way because for 2,000 years they've done it their way, yelling and screaming and beating on people," he said.

All four entrepreneurs got their starts because of experience in their prior careers. Whether they were funded by personal savings or retirement plans, Cropek, Wilson, and Sells all spent many years with a certain level of risk aversion. They were able to prepare, to scheme, and to take a good, hard look at whether their plans were feasible. The stability of their early careers paid dividends later.

For these three, the stability afforded by being "company men" for many years enabled these second-career entrepreneurs to take the leap.

Bartmann, the outlier of the group, is less risk averse, perhaps because he got in to business earlier in life than the others. He accepts risk as part of the game, and he revels in it. For him, this is one of the best parts about being an entrepreneur. "You get to make the decisions that have to do with your own success or failure ... there's an absolute relationship between the outcome and the decisions that you get to make," he said.

However, he has experience in common with the other three. All four entrepreneurs were able to see what works and what doesn't work in their respective fields before establishing their companies. This can give them a leg up on their younger competition.

Older entrepreneurs know their fields and their markets more intimately than their younger counterparts. Years of experience in a particular field and in a particular market (like greater Tulsa) can be just as valuable -- and perhaps even more valuable -- than the more theoretical knowledge a younger business owner might bring to the table.

Cropek, the inventor, created his adaptors because he saw a need that wasn't being filled. Sharing the invention with others in his field only increases the enjoyment of the work. He said one of the most rewarding aspects of his business is "being able to solve the problem for these other contractors not being able to have what they need to perform their job."

It is also important to Cropek to sell his products at an affordable price. He has seen similar products to his on the Internet, but they sell for upwards of $100 a piece. Cropek's adaptors sell for $8 to $10 each. As far as he knows, his adaptors are the only ones available anywhere in their price range.

A younger entrepreneur may not have had enough experience in the field to know how desperately products like Cropek's were needed. Setting prices and knowing how to move merchandise were never major problems for Cropek; he'd learned business from his previous career in construction. "I kind of knew how to do stuff," he said.

In other words, Cropek's experience in the field showed him what works, what doesn't work, and what can be improved. Learning how to make a bit of money didn't hurt either.

HEATH SHARP

As with Cropek, one impetus behind Wilson's move to private practice was an unfilled need. Few therapists in Tulsa work in her specific field. "My specialty has always been child sexual abuse and adult sex offenders," she said. Perhaps understandably, there are few therapists who want to delve into this area, and many of those who do burn out after a short time.

Many people consider sex offenders the absolute worst people in society, and many therapists are therefore unable or unwilling to work with them. When Wilson started her business, there were only two other therapists in the area that worked in her field, one in Tulsa and one in Bartlesville. "There's just not many people who want to do that work. I found that my reputation with adult sex offenders was growing," Wilson said, especially for court-ordered therapy.

Likewise, not many therapists are able to work with abuse victims as young as those Wilson works with, who are generally between three and six. Because of limited communication skills in children that young, few have the skills necessary to approach that work. "Because of the specialized work that I do, there's not that many people who do treatment of very young children," Wilson said.

These two facts enable Wilson to acquire a large market share in a short period of time. She took over the practice in Bartlesville, where she travels a couple of times a week, in addition to her work in Tulsa. She has even taken on business in southeastern Kansas as there are no other qualified therapists in the area.

It has even allowed her to expand. "I currently have two therapists who work with me in Bartlesville," she said. A younger entrepreneur just starting out in psychotherapy may not have had the reputation to become as successful.

But most importantly for Wilson, she has been able to effect positive good in the Tulsa community. "I feel like I make a difference," Wilson said.

Sells spent many years learning how to cook and blend coffee beans just so. He gets chatty -- maybe it's the caffeine -- when talking about coffee blends and roasts. He explained that on the East Coast, Italian roasts are the darkest, while French roasts are the darkest on the West Coast. Of the 14 to 16 types of bean Sells uses, he is able to make about 22 different blends.

A delicate palate, developed after years of honing, has helped Sells see a need in his own market. Since returning to Oklahoma, he's noticed that even nice restaurants don't serve coffee with the same precision that they serve everything else. While a chef may spend a lot of time picking the perfect cut of steak or the best kind of wine, Sells said Tulsa restaurateurs serve swill for coffee at the end of the meal. "Coffee is a lot more complicated than wine," he said.

As a result, Sells has spent the last year or two developing the coffee he believes restaurants will want, and he is nearly ready. "The last thing I want to do is build a [customer] base if I don't have the coffee," he said.

COURTESY OF BILL BARTMANN

Bartmann's experience likewise helps him see opportunities as they arise. He calls it being a contrarian. "When the whole world claims the economy is bad and there are no opportunities, that's when an entrepreneur finds a unique and good opportunity," he said.

Bartmann spoke of his earlier entrepreneurial endeavors with a sort of regret for his impetuousness. For example, he moved to Muskogee in the early 1980s to supervise his real estate investments. He instantly wanted to get involved in oil, an industry he knew nothing about. He said that after only 30 days in Oklahoma, "I drilled my first oil well. The bad news is we hit oil ... only to find out they weren't necessarily very productive." It took some time to learn that oil wells in Oklahoma do not always produce large amounts of oil.

With perhaps a few exceptions in the tech industry, it can take years of observation to develop the skills to see just what needs are not being met in a community or industry. While knowledge of where one lives cannot replace market research, it is an indispensible part of learning whether a business idea has potential. This is something that a younger entrepreneur often doesn't have, simply because he or she hasn't lived long enough. Both the planning and the knowledge can help second-career entrepreneurs become successful.

Second-career entrepreneurs have different incentives from their younger counterparts. Entrepreneurs in their twenties frequently have to make as much money as possible as fast as possible. This may be seen on a grand scale with a company like Facebook, which was worth billions after only a few years. Or it may be seen in a smaller way -- as when an aspiring entrepreneur has to repay student debt in addition to keep his or her company afloat.

On the other hand, an older entrepreneur -- like Cropek -- may be a very serious hobbyist who wants to make some extra cash. Even someone like Sells, who has major plans for his company, chose his line of business primarily out of personal love.

Others, like Wilson and Bartmann, don't switch careers, but wish to have more flexibility or control in what they do. "I love the fact that I can set my own hours, that I don't have to put everything to a committee to get approval ... there's so much more freedom," Wilson said.

Bartmann agreed. "Clearly the most important aspect ... [is being] captain of your own ship," he said.

As the gig economy -- the tendency for workers to piece together a living from several part-time jobs -- has become part of the nation, more people have become entrepreneurs by necessity. According to a 2011 article in The Atlantic, 2009 saw the highest level of entrepreneurship in the previous 14 years. In other words, the Great Recession has made more of us entrepreneurs than anything since the dotcom bubble. Many freelancers -- writers, graphic designers, and others -- do not have the luxury these second-career entrepreneurs had in choosing to do something they love, or to spend years building a reputation.

In the future, it will be less likely that Americans -- and Tulsans -- will stay in the same job for 40 years like they used to. However, employees and potential entrepreneurs may draw a couple of lessons from second-career business owners.

The first is not to take on too much risk too quickly. While some risk is necessary for success, each of these entrepreneurs had some sort of back-up plan. Sells had at least partial retirement plans, while Wilson had part-time work and a year's worth of savings. This may not be possible for everyone, but it can soften a blow in case of failure -- or slow success.

A second lesson is that reputation is everything. Wilson was successful fairly quickly because she was well regarded by colleagues in her field. Cropek got his start because his bosses -- later his business partners -- liked his idea and respected his previous work enough to take a chance on it.

Future entrepreneurs who follow the example of business owners like these may not become millionaires, but they may be able to earn a living. More importantly, they may find professional and personal joy in their work. Perhaps Cropek put it best: "Satisfaction, you might say."