This article in The Washington Post (https://wapo.st/3tiHcjh) is about boomers having difficulty accepting retirement. It leads with a story line about one particular man who couldn't accept his own retirement, and continues with some statistics and insights about aging business owners. And then it explains how he dealt with his problem, working with SCORE and his SCORE mentor, our very own Norman Sherman. Congratulations, yet again, on doing a great deed, Norman.
- Mark Cutler, Northeast Regional Vice President
'...Lehrer was so tied to his job — one that over the years sometimes kept him away from family because of long hours — that he needed outside counsel to help him grapple with retirement. He reached out to the U.S. Small Business Administration-supported nonprofit SCORE for advice. Through SCORE, Lehrer was assigned to a mentor named Norman Sherman, himself a retired baby boomer entrepreneur.
“He couldn’t pull the trigger,” Sherman said of Lehrer. It’s a struggle many of Sherman’s boomer mentees face.
“The concept of giving up their business and giving up their identity is a very difficult thing to do,” Sherman said.
Lehrer agreed. “I just was not prepared to cut it off,” he said. “It felt very uncomfortable.”
The two worked together to develop a plan, and it seems to be working. Lehrer spent a fourth of the year in Florida in 2020 and in 2021. He has picked up pickleball. When Sherman and Lehrer last met online for a mentor-mentee meeting in December 2021, Lehrer said he had finally come to terms with his retirement.
“We celebrated,” Sherman said. “Then I said, 'The first thing you need to do is give up your business email address, email account, because I need you to cut off all vestiges.’”
That final cutoff was not the hardest part, Lehrer said. That’s in part because, against Sherman’s advice, Lehrer has kept his Cambridge Life email address, which he now uses to do pro bono insurance consulting.
The hardest part was giving up the 45-minute drive he made each day from Westchester, N.Y., to his office near Madison Square Garden, Lehrer said.
“What’s difficult is giving up leaving the home and going to work,” he said. “That whole process of thinking about work on the way to work, of planning mentally your day.”
The new generation of leaders stepping in is changing business practices to suit their own work styles and ethic, incorporating more technology and delegating tasks rather than shouldering all the workload the way some baby boomers, known for the long hours they put in at the office, once did...'
Read the full article here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/02/25/baby-boomer-business-owner-future/
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