The Baby Boomer phenomenon – and its passing

1946 – 1964

The generation reaching retirement

The term Baby Boomers is taken from Generation Naming Convention, people born between 1946 and 1964: the generation reaching retirement age of 65 between the years 2011 to 2029, having founded businesses from the 1970s onwards and built them up through hard work. The traditional route for business-owning retirees was to pass the business on to their children to continue to run.

From the early 1980s, the world-wide trend of transfer of manufacturing with traditional equipment & labour based style businesses from West to East, coupled with the exciting dawn of the internet, personal computers and mobile phones, transformed the economics base of the West into service-based economies, banking, IT, online commerce and the like.

This, was so far advanced by the time the children of the Baby Boomers were coming of age for career choice, that traditional industry businesses and the hard work they saw their parents go through, held no appeal.

TECH-SAVVY

The new generation

The so-called “tech-savvy” youngsters want to generate income from social media, over their phones and work from home – even more pronounced in Generation Z than it was in Generation Y/Millennials – without thought for how all these toys come into existence.

As their appetite and energy for running their companies ebbs, many Baby Boomer business owners are left without the option of their children taking over the business to fund their retirement and must seek a buyer, if the business is saleable, or to simply close it if it does not have sale value.