What Darryl Kauffman's Career Says About Business Reinvention

For generations, the conventional career path followed a fairly predictable pattern. People chose a profession, developed expertise, moved into increasingly senior positions, and eventually began preparing for retirement. Changing direction later in life was often treated as an exception to that pattern. Today, however, longer careers are creating more opportunities for professionals to rethink what they want the next stage of their working lives to look like.

Darryl Kauffman’s career provides one example of what that can look like. Over several decades, Kauffman has worked in public accounting, corporate leadership, business ownership, consulting, and business coaching. More recently, he has returned to formal education, continuing to study business after spending much of his adult life working inside it. Rather than viewing those changes as separate careers, Kauffman sees them as connected chapters that have allowed him to build on what he already knows while staying open to something different.

“I never really looked at my career as having one final destination,” Kauffman says. “There were things I wanted to learn, different environments I wanted to experience, and opportunities that made sense at different points in my life. I think your idea of what you want to do can change as you do.”

Longer careers are changing the traditional timeline

Kauffman’s experience reflects a broader shift in how Americans are approaching the later stages of their careers. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projections show that older Americans are expected to remain in the workforce at increasing rates. Labor force participation among people ages 65 to 74 is projected to rise from 26.9% in 2023 to 30.4% by 2033. Among people 75 and older, participation is projected to increase from 8.3% to 10.1% during the same period.

Those figures do not mean that every older professional is planning a dramatic career change, but they do suggest that the traditional boundary between a working career and retirement is becoming less rigid. When professional lives extend further, people have more time to pursue new interests, develop additional skills, start businesses, return to school, or apply their existing knowledge in different settings.

For Kauffman, that longer perspective changes the way he thinks about experience. He does not believe that spending decades developing expertise means a person has to spend the remainder of a career doing exactly the same thing. In his view, experience can create more choices rather than fewer.

“There is a difference between having experience and deciding that your experience has to define everything you do next,” Kauffman says. “The things you have already done should give you options. They shouldn’t necessarily limit the options you are willing to consider.”

Reinvention does not mean discarding what came before

The word “reinvention” can sometimes suggest abandoning an old identity and replacing it with a new one. Kauffman sees the process differently. A second act does not require erasing the first. Instead, previous experience can become the foundation that makes a new direction possible.

Kauffman began his career in public accounting before moving into corporate positions that included responsibilities as a CFO, financial analyst, and controller. He later ran his own accounting practice and expanded into consulting and business coaching. Those transitions exposed him to businesses from different vantage points, but they also allowed knowledge acquired in one setting to carry into another.

“You learn things in one environment that you don’t realize will be useful somewhere else,” Kauffman says. “Something you learned dealing with a problem in a large company might become useful when you are working with a smaller business. Something you learned as an owner changes the way you think about decisions you used to make as an employee.”

Research on entrepreneurship supports that idea. A study published through the National Bureau of Economic Research analyzed administrative data involving 2.7 million U.S. business founders whose companies went on to hire at least one employee. Researchers found that the average founder was about 42 years old. Among the fastest-growing new ventures, the average founder age was 45. The researchers also found that previous experience within the relevant industry was associated with greater entrepreneurial success.

The findings challenge the popular image of entrepreneurship as primarily a young person’s pursuit. They also suggest that accumulated professional experience can remain valuable when someone decides to pursue a new direction.

Starting something new is not the same as starting from zero

One misconception about career reinvention is that changing direction requires starting over. An experienced professional may certainly become a beginner again in some respects, but that person does not lose the judgment, knowledge, relationships, and perspective accumulated during previous stages of a career.

Kauffman has encountered that distinction firsthand by returning to formal business education. After decades of working with real organizations and real business problems, he now encounters many of those same subjects from an academic perspective. The experience puts him in an unusual position. He can be learning something new while simultaneously comparing it with situations he has already experienced.

“I don’t think going back to school erases what you already know,” Kauffman says. “It gives you another place to examine it. I can hear an idea now and compare it against situations I have actually experienced. At the same time, I have to be willing to hear something that challenges the way I have always thought about it.”

That willingness to become a student again can be one of the more difficult parts of professional reinvention. Experienced professionals are accustomed to understanding the language of their field, knowing what is expected of them, and having their expertise recognized. Moving into unfamiliar territory can temporarily remove some of that certainty. Someone who spent years leading other people may suddenly be asking basic questions again, learning unfamiliar systems, or accepting feedback in areas where they have not yet developed expertise.

Kauffman does not view that discomfort as a reason to avoid change. Instead, he believes previous success should provide a foundation for exploring other possibilities.

“I think there is a tendency to believe that once you become good at something, you should stay in that lane,” he says. “But being good at something doesn’t mean you have to do only that for the rest of your life.”

A second act does not have to be dramatic

Career reinvention is often presented as a dramatic event. Someone quits a longtime job, launches a company, moves across the country, or enters an entirely different profession. In reality, many second acts develop gradually. An executive may begin consulting. A business owner may return to school. Someone with decades of professional experience may begin teaching, mentoring, or pursuing a project that would not have fit naturally into an earlier stage of a career.

That broader definition becomes particularly relevant as careers stretch across four or five decades. The interests and priorities someone has at 25 are unlikely to remain completely unchanged at 45, 55, or 65. New opportunities emerge, industries change, and people themselves develop different ideas about what they find challenging or worthwhile.

Kauffman’s own path has evolved in that way. His accounting experience created opportunities in corporate business. His corporate experience shaped his perspective as a business owner and consultant. His years in business now affect how he approaches formal education. Each chapter adds something to the next without requiring him to pretend the earlier chapters never happened.

“I still like learning something I didn’t know before,” Kauffman says. “I still like seeing whether an idea can become something real. I don’t think that has an expiration date.”

Experience can create options

There is another benefit to a career with multiple chapters. Moving between different environments can force professionals to determine which parts of their knowledge are truly transferable. A method that worked inside a large organization may need to be adjusted for a small business. An employee's priorities can look different after someone becomes an owner. Advice that seems reasonable from outside an organization can become more complicated when the person giving it is also responsible for implementing it.

For Kauffman, moving through different business environments has created a broader frame of reference. The value is not simply in having held different titles. It comes from seeing how decisions look from different positions and recognizing that a person's perspective often changes depending on where they are sitting.

That may be one of the strongest arguments for viewing later-career reinvention as an extension of experience rather than a departure from it. A second act can combine knowledge developed separately and create opportunities that would have been difficult to recognize earlier in a career.

Leaving room for another chapter

The idea of a single, linear career may become increasingly difficult to maintain as people remain professionally active longer. Not everyone will want to start a business, return to college, or make a major career change. The larger shift may simply be that experienced professionals have more permission to ask what else they would like to do.

Kauffman’s career illustrates that possibility. Accounting, corporate leadership, entrepreneurship, consulting, and education do not have to represent unrelated stops on a résumé. They can be viewed as different ways of participating in business over the course of a long professional life.

For Darryl Lynn Kauffman, reinvention does not require knowing exactly where the next chapter will lead. What matters more is remaining interested enough to consider one.

“I don’t feel like I need to have the rest of it mapped out,” Kauffman says. “There are still things that interest me, and I’m still learning. As long as that is true, I think there is room for another chapter.”