Reinvention is the Buzz at Boomer Conference
Friday, April 23rd, 2010We were extremely honored and excited to have Michael Winerip, the New York Times Generation B columnist, at our 2nd Annual Florida Boomer Lifestyle Conference, even more so since it was the first Boomer conference that he’d ever attended. He spent the entire daywith us listening to presentations, speaking with attendees, interviewing speakers and attending a couple of our breakout sessions. He wrote a wonderful wrap-up of the day’s events and the key trends and takeaways he left the Conference with.
Here is the full column that is now available online and featured in the April 25th, Sunday print edition:
The Fountain of Reinvention
The New York Times - April 23, 2010
By MICHAEL WINERIP
CLEARWATER, Fla.
I’D never been to a boomer conference and figured it was time to try one. So, recently I joined 250 mainly boomer-age business people who had paid $195 each for a day’s worth of speeches, seminars and networking opportunities here at the second annual Florida Boomer Lifestyle Conference.
It was hard at first to tell from the list of speakers and sponsors whether this was the best of times for boomers (Shirley Mitchell, author of “Fabulous After 50” and “Sensational After 60”); the worst of times (Roger Chiocchi, author of “Baby Boomer Bust? How the Generation of Promise Became the Generation of Panic”); or the end of times (Suncoast Hospice, a major conference sponsor).
If there was a buzzword, it was “reinvention.” The morning keynote speaker was Brent Green, the author of “Generation Reinvention.” The speaker at seminar 2B, “Reinventing Your Business, Reinventing Yourself,” was introduced as the “reinvention guru Karen Post.” The conference was opened by Colleen Chappell, a marketing executive who praised boomers for “truly reinventing everything,” including “redefining reinvention.”
But it was a presentation by Lorin Drake, a market researcher, that made clear why so many attendees needed to be reinvented: 39 percent of boomer households in Florida had someone who’d lost a job in the last five years; 34 percent had experienced a hospitalization; 15 percent had a mortgage that was larger than the value of their home.
The good news, said Mr. Drake of Schwartz Consulting Partners, is that 74 percent of boomers plan to stay in Florida. The bad news is there is not much choice because of the dead real estate market.
More bad news, he said, was that a quarter of Florida boomers are now living with a parent or an adult child, or both. “What’s it result in?” he said. “A boomer mom who says, ‘I didn’t sign up for this.’ ”
The good news for savvy marketers? “If we win over the boomer mom, we win over the adult kids and parents who live with her,” he said. “We can scoop up all three at once.”
That was why Mary Maloney, 41, a marketing specialist in the technology sector who has been downsized twice in this recession, was in attendance, and she took note. “I mean, there are 78 million boomers — it’s good to know,” she said.
Darlene Jalowsky, 62, a former geriatric-care manager, agreed. “I’m here to learn how to make money off boomers,” she said.
Mr. Drake had one last bit of research to share before concluding. His surveys indicate that a significant number of boomers don’t like the term. When addressing one, he suggested saying “your age group” instead.
Although the attendees were dressed in business attire and had worked in corporate America for decades, you could still hear an occasional echo of the ’60s. One speaker, A. D. Frazier, the former chief executive of the Chicago Stock Exchange who now has his own business that provides back office services to small companies, urged those who were laid off to start a business. “Don’t go back to work for The Man,” he said.
Pat Deering, 59, did not. A longtime human resources director for a real estate company, she told the conference, “I’d sent a lot of individuals home because positions were eliminated” — and then she, too, was fired.
Instead of re-upping with The Man, she bought the Tampa-area FranNet franchise — which finds franchises for people to buy.
“Stand up, Paul Lallanilla,” she said. “He’s taken control of his life.”
The audience applauded for Mr. Lallanilla, who’d spent $100,000 to buy a Right at Home home-care franchise with Ms. Deering’s help.
“Ron, would you like to stand up?” Ms. Deering said, and they applauded for Ron McCaslin, 63, who had opened a Speedpro Imaging printing franchise. Mr. McCaslin had been president of Jim Walter Homes, overseeing 2,000 employees until the recession. The company’s construction business closed, and he was let go. He paid $350,000, half of his retirement savings, for the Speedpro franchise. “I’ve put it all on the line,” he said. “I won’t ever retire.”
Laurie Orlov, 59, the founder of Aging in Place Technology Watch, told the group how she had parlayed several trends affecting older people into a successful business with clients that include AARP and Philips Global. With the real estate collapse, she realized that more elderly people would not be able to sell their homes or afford assisted living (projected to cost $51,000 a year in Florida by 2015); that they would need more monitoring at home; and that they had techno-savvy adult children willing to spend on products like health alarms and movement sensors.
She described a new, computer-linked pill dispenser that lights up when it’s time to take medication and calls you if you’ve forgotten — and if you don’t answer the phone, it can call your children. The problem, she said, is that the technology companies don’t know how to sell it.
“This is a kind of sad market right now,” she said. She believes the way to go is bundling such devices — pill dispensers, neck alarms, movement sensors, GPS devices — into a package of services that families could subscribe to for a monthly fee of perhaps $50.
Ms. Orlov described how her background — being a chief technology officer for two companies, a market researcher in the late 90’s when e-commerce was beginning and a caretaker for her mother, who had Alzheimer’s — helped her to see what others hadn’t.
In the afternoon at reinvention seminar 2B, Ms. Post displayed a line graph of her life that looked like a roller coaster. She explained that she had become a reinvention guru the hard way, by having two businesses fail, including a dot-com start-up that she’d raised $1 million for in 2001 and that went bust nine months later. “You feel like you want to die, but we baby boomers are so strong,” she said.
She said that her current business, as an inspirational speaker and coach on rebranding and reinvention, is “all on the upswing.” Each time she’s started over, people she thought were friends discouraged her. “I had to shed friends and associates,” Ms. Post said. “Sometimes you have to kick friends to the curb.”
Other advice:
“You cannot believe what your own mind tells you. My life was saying big loser. Separate truth from trash in your head.”
“It’s never too late to come up with an idea and reinvent yourself.”
“You need to step up and stand out.”
During questions, David Valladarez, an architect, asked, “This is all great, but how do you use it to get work?”
Ms. Post said, “Your services need to be sliced and diced and repackaged.”
She suggested that — with so many boomers now having parents and adult children moving in, and with elderly people staying in their homes longer — Mr. Valladarez, as an architect, might be able to capitalize on the need to redesign and adapt those homes. She called it “spicing new spices on your business.”
Later, I asked Mr. Valladarez, who’s been an architect 25 years, how bad business was. “Dead for lack of a better term,” he said. “The floor’s been pulled out. No real projects.”
Asked if the conference was worthwhile, he said: “Oh, yes. This boomer thing, multi-generational housing, people aging in place — I’m thinking about it.
“It could be the first time in my career I’m out front of the curve,” he said. “It’s just so hard to know.”
And then he hurried off to hear the closing speaker, Mary Furlong, the author of “Silver to Gold: How to Profit in the Baby Boomer Marketplace.”
