Businesses Can Tap into Deep Pool of Age 45+ Canadian Expertise to Overcome Challenges and Drive Growth
As an age 45+ businessperson you’ve developed your business expertise over the course of your career, whether in large companies or small or medium enterprises (SMEs). Now maybe you are wondering if you can use that expertise on your own terms for your own motivations. Perhaps you want to keep doing some kind of work for the benefits of having a purpose, activity, engagement, giving back, or for financial reasons - whatever suits you. You aren’t necessarily formally doing consulting work now, but you know your expertise – regardless of functional area, seniority level, and industry - doesn’t stop having value in the marketplace just because you had a few more birthdays. But it can be hard to get started, including finding clients, especially if you have more specialized experience. There’s many of us out there, providing a deep pool of business expertise. The fact is, older Canadians age 45+ can now efficiently use their business expertise to earn income providing guidance for Canadian SMEs, helping them address key challenges.
As noted in a previous blog, SMEs account for 88% of the Canadian private sector labourforce. They face big challenges in trying to survive, let alone grow. About 90% of start-ups fail. Only 0.1% of the 1.2 million Canadian small businesses become medium-sized, and only 2% of 220,000 medium businesses become large. The barriers to SMEs’ growth tend to cluster around market intelligence, marketing, and financial, plus interdependent functional and operational expertise. SMEs often have trouble getting the guidance they need, because advice is too expensive and specialized expertise can be hard-to-find, plus they often don’t have the budget for additional headcount. A lot of business consulting is done through word-of-mouth connections. But what happens when your network doesn’t include the experience needed? Sometimes SMEs may just need a few hours of advisory services from experienced freelancing businesspeople. But how and where to find them?
Tapping into the Pool of Age 45+ Canadian Businesspeople
So very clearly SMEs need your expertise. The heck with ageism – this is about the value you create for businesses. Younger adults do gig work, so why shouldn’t age 45+ businesspeople do it too? We mean high value gigwork, either as a side hustle for older Canadians or doing it more often - it’s up to you. You can leverage your expertise, not worry about “career transitioning”, retraining, or being under-employed. Or if you want to retrain, gigs using your existing expertise can provide a nice bridge to it.
Your fees are probably much lower than large consulting companies, since you have lower overhead and don’t have to share a portion with the business you work for. That appeals to SMEs and provides income opportunities for age 45+ Canadian businesspeople.
Finding Age 45+ Businesspeople: The “Long Tail”
As has been pointed out by Statscan, business roles requiring university education aren’t actually facing a skills shortage. Rather, there is a skills mismatch between what an SME needs and what it can efficiently find. Basically it’s the “long tail” in action, where instead of being about the volume of products sold it’s about the commonness or rarity of business expertise. Further, it isn’t just about finding skills, but finding experience – people like you who have been through many challenges before and made the mistakes and accrued the learning from real world situations that come with your experience. You don’t just know data and information, you’ve got knowledge and wisdom accumulated through the situations you have been in.
Finding You and Using Your Age 45+ Business Expertise: “Knowledge Gigs”
Now there is a dedicated online Canadian marketplace where SMEs can find the experience, work ethic, and cost-effectiveness that age 45+ businesspeople provide. It’s called Elderberry.work. The diagram below shows the “Knowledge Gigs Ecosystem” that our solution elegantly provides.
The SME defines what its “Knowledge Gig” requirements are, and Elderberry.work matches the right candidates to it. The SME decides, depending on its budget, how extensive an engagement with age 45+ expertise it wants, from just a few hours to bounce some ideas off, to projects, contracts, part-time, and even full-time employment. Perhaps it wants advice, or to benchmark their practices and processes against best-in-class, or drive process or communications improvements.
The great thing is that they can now efficiently find your specific expertise, almost on-demand, and at your reasonable price. So rather than “talent acquisition”, and all the time and costs associated with that, the SME’s functional areas and lines of business can go directly and swiftly to finding you. We call that efficient “talent integration”.
2 Ways to Find Gigs and 3 Ways Elderberry.work Supports Your Success
Elderberry.work enables Age 45+ businesspeople to find gigs in two ways: list your expertise so SMEs can browse to find you (see an example), or you can browse Knowledge Gigs posted by SMEs and contact them. So SMEs can take action dynamically, with your assistance, whether developing multi-year plans or pivoting in real time to react to a changing operating context.
Elderberry.work helps you, a Canadian age 45+ businessperson, by providing guidance on becoming a freelancer, attracting potential customers for you, and handling payments processing for you, through global payments leader Stripe, in a way that you will always be paid for the work you do.
The net result is high value and cost-efficient input to ignite acceleration in SMEs’ growth, and an effective ongoing way to satisfy your age 45+ motivations.
And think of the additional value you create for SMEs and their typically younger employees – your excellent examples of work ethic, communication, and other soft skills.
Get the full details on Elderberry.work, a social enterprise designed to help age 45+ businesspeople and SMEs. Browse age 45+ expertise listings and SME gigs postings.