New training options can help you start a business later in life

Gail Snow Moraski was nearly 54 when, dissatisfied with her corporate marketing position after surviving a bout with cancer, she quit her job.

Armed with her MBA and career experience, Moraski planned to find another job. But then, having already occasionally freelanced, she decided to try something altogether different: working for herself.

“I’ve always been a risk-taker,” says Moraski, now 65, who started a company called Results Communications and Research that has since served more than 150 clients. “That’s part of my personality. I’m not afraid to take a leap.”

Nearly 1 in 6 Americans over 55 who are still in the workforce are entrepreneurs, according to the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, meaning they’ve run businesses of their own for the critical threshold of three and a half years or more.

“Senior entrepreneurship has significantly picked up,” says Christoph Winkler, a professor of entrepreneurship and innovation at Iona University and editor of Entrepreneurship Education and Pedagogy, the journal of the United States Association for Small Business and Entrepreneurship. “Older entrepreneurs are doing this more, and they do it more successfully.”

That’s in part because they often have many of the resources that it takes to successfully launch a business, such as financial stability, experience and professional networks. But the same things can be handicaps, says Winkler. “If you worked in a corporate setting for 40 years, you weren’t incentivized to think outside the box.”