Is Half-Retirement Right for You?

By Jim Muehlhausen, J.D.

There’s a saying, “Business owners don’t sell for money; they sell because they are frustrated.” They want to start enjoying life more, but they can’t figure out how to “escape” the demands of their business, so they sell.

Many times, the lump sum of cash they receive from the business is less than desired, and they have to curb their lifestyle to match decreased income. That’s not fair after so many years of hard work that business owners face the hard choice of continuing to grind away at the business or sell it just to escape.

There’s a new exit strategy many business owners are using to keep their business income but end the daily grind. It’s called Half-Retirement. Half-Retired business owners work as little as two half-days a week but keep their income. This allows them to enjoy the benefits of both retirement and business ownership.

Half-Retirement isn’t as simple as playing hooky from work. Your business will need to run on autopilot without you being around all the time. It’s a process to get from where your business is today to where it will be when you can Half-Retire, but it can be done with a plan.

There is a six-step process to allow business owners to Half-Retire. You can see the process in the infographic below. One of the most surprising steps required to Half-Retire is a shift in the business owner’s mindsets. The way an everyday business owner “CEOs” the business is very different than how a Half-Retired CEO runs the enterprise. Half Retire

[Click for larger image.]

Many mindsets that have created your successful business may work against you in Half-Retirement. In fact, we have identified twenty-one mindsets detrimental to Half-Retirement. No one is struggling with all twenty-one, but everyone struggles with some. By remapping old mindsets to Half-Retire-friendly mindsets, the business owner can see a radical reduction in their workload.

Take Joni, for instance. She promised her husband two years ago to retire when he did. He had a job he could just quit. It was trickier for her to just walk away from her successful business. She felt like she was missing the best years with her grandkids and had broken her promise, so she was motivated to change.

Just six weeks after deciding to Half-Retire, Joni had shed half of her workload and spend a solid month at her lake house with her grandkids. How was she able to get such radical results? She changed how she envisioned her role at the company. By identifying her problem mindsets and remapping them to ones that serve Half-Retirement, she freed herself from the grind.

In chapter five of Half-Retire: Keep Your Business, Ditch the Stress, I show you how to identify your problem mindsets and then remap them to Half-Retire-friendly ones. This type of mental work is foreign to many business owners, but there’s no better initiative you can take to enjoy the benefits of retirement.

You’ve worked hard to build your business, don’t miss out on the freedom and enjoyment of retirement because you can’t escape “the grind.”

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Order your copy of the book, Half-Retire – Keep Your Business, Ditch the Stress at: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Half-Retire/Jim-Muehlhausen-JD/9781642935653