Business After 60: Advice & Real Experience

Business After 60: Real Businesses. Real Experience.

Running a business after 60 can be every bit as interesting, challenging and rewarding as it was when you started. But some of the questions change.

Perhaps you’ve spent 30 years building a business and now find that customers, technology and the way people buy are changing faster than ever.

Perhaps you’re still ambitious, but increasingly conscious that growth isn’t the only measure of success.

You might be dealing with recruitment, rising costs, sales challenges or the question of how to make your business less dependent on you.

Or perhaps you’re simply wondering what the next five, ten or fifteen years of your working life should look like.

Perhaps you’re thinking about using your experience to start a business of your own, develop a specialist service or even turn a hobby into a new venture.

These are real questions facing real business owners.

And they’re worth talking about.

Business After 60 is Ropho’s place for practical business conversations, grounded in experience and focused on the challenges and opportunities facing small business owners in their later working years.

I’m interested in the businesses that keep our economy moving: manufacturers, contractors, service businesses, consultancies and the many other enterprises built through years of hard work, relationships and experience.

Not corporate business theory for its own sake.

Not a promise of overnight success.

Just useful ideas, honest questions and practical thinking about the things that matter when you’re running a business.

I’ve spent more than four decades around business, from engineering and electrical contracting to B2B sales, sales management, business ownership and working alongside small business owners as a business adviser.

Over the years, I’ve learned that some of the most valuable business conversations happen when people who understand the realities of running a business sit down together and talk openly about what’s happening.

That’s the spirit I want Ropho to bring to Business After 60.

A sounding board for business owners

Business owners can spend a lot of time solving other people’s problems.

Finding someone to discuss their own challenges with isn’t always so easy.

You might have employees, advisers, suppliers and customers, but still need a different perspective on a decision that’s keeping you awake at night.

Should you change your sales approach? Is it time to recruit? Are your systems holding you back? How do you adapt when a long-standing customer changes the way they buy? And how do you plan for the future without losing sight of the business you need to run today?

Through Ropho’s Business After 60 Conversations, I’ll explore questions like these, share practical experience and invite you to consider approaches that might help in your own business.

Because experience isn’t just something to look back on. It’s something to use, share and build upon.

Sales, customers and changing markets

How do you win the right business, understand changing customer expectations, improve B2B sales and build relationships that last?

Running a better business

Profitability, cash flow, pricing, recruitment, delegation, systems and productivity. The everyday issues that determine whether a business is healthy, regardless of its size.

Adapting to change

Technology, AI, customer behaviour, new competitors and changing expectations. How can an established business adapt without abandoning everything that made it successful?

The owner and the next chapter

Succession, stepping back, bringing in a partner, making the business less dependent on the owner and deciding what you want from the next stage of working life.