At age 52, Bob Moose is learning how to start and run a small business, a process that means re-evaluating most of what he knows -- including sermons from his parents.

Mr. Moose left his employer of 24 years last fall. In August, he began attending a program called FastTrac at Kutztown University in Kutztown, Pa. The classes are designed to give entrepreneurs insights into building a company.

"One of the things that we talked about is how your parents ... taught you not to talk to strangers," Mr. Moose recalls. But for him to succeed, he says he knows he will have to expand his circle of contacts to drum up business. And that means promoting himself and his business to complete strangers.

"To start to learn and feel more comfortable with that process is really an exciting thing," he says.

Whether by choice or because they have fallen victim to the economic crunch, more older Americans than ever are turning to self-employment. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 33% of people age 55-plus are working, the highest level in 23 years. And economists and educators say that many of them -- about 2.6 million -- are flexing their entrepreneurial muscles.

To help these would-be CEOs, educators and government officials are developing programs like FastTrac, courses that serve as a primer on the nuts and bolts of business planning. At the same time, the programs offer something of a reality check for career changers, especially those with visions of quick success.

"They expect to hit the ground running and ... expect doors to open" because of their experience, particularly when they come from the corporate world, says Bernadette Tiernan, associate state director of the New Jersey Small Business Development Centers, with headquarters at the Rutgers School of Business in Newark. (It is one of a network of similar offices around the country funded by the Small Business Administration.) But, Ms. Tiernan adds, "they aren't necessarily comfortable ... rolling up shirtsleeves."

Therese Flaherty, director of an SBDC associated with the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, estimates that the majority of people who enter the school's program on small-business fundamentals -- "The First Steps: Getting to the Starting Line" -- never start a business.

"A lot of people come ... with a very vague idea of what they're starting, and half of those people don't come back," Ms. Flaherty says. She notes that the center forces participants to ask and answer tough questions, such as how much money they really need for financial security, and whether they could live with less. "We make people ... face the question before they get halfway down the road," Ms. Flaherty says.

Another resource is the Service Corps of Retired Executives, or Score, a nationwide network of 10,500 volunteers dispersed among 389 locations. Score, a nonprofit organization that works with the Small Business administration, calls itself the "counselors to America's small business."

What should you look for in a good small-business program? The following is a sampling of courses across the country, highlighting some of the benefits and pitfalls in this type of instruction. As a rule, costs are reasonable. Workshop prices of $25 aren't unusual, and the most expensive program we found -- FastTrac, sponsored by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, in Kansas City, Mo. -- costs $800 for an 11-week course. The programs themselves are widely available in most states, although you might have to dig a bit to find them; advertising budgets for such organizations typically are small to nonexistent.

One of the biggest variables: the instructors' level of experience. Many programs, however, say they recruit entrepreneurs who have successfully launched and operated their own businesses.

Larta University

Larta University, based in Los Angeles, actually isn't a university at all. It's a division of a technology consulting firm called Larta, also in Los Angeles. Courses are designed for and appeal to a particular type of entrepreneur: one with a technical or scientific background who hopes to go public.

The program got its start in 1999 as a series of workshops to give aspiring entrepreneurs a better understanding of how to build and run a small business before venture capitalists start breathing down their necks.

The Entrepreneurship 101 course is offered at least twice a month and consists of nine parts, which can be taken during the course of a year. Participants can buy the entire nine-workshop block or purchase courses a la carte, depending on their interests. Workshop No. 1 is titled "Strategic Planning for Your Venture" and includes a "SWOT" analysis, which stands for "Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats." Other topics include the importance of intellectual property, creating strategic business alliances and the best ways to make investor presentations.

Who attends? After the dot-com gold rush of the late 1990s, the people now turning to programs like Entrepreneurship 101 are older, wiser and grappling with ideas that "they've sublimated for years," says Rohit Shukla, chief executive officer of Larta.

"The market may have passed them by, money opportunities that were plentiful a few years ago have now dried up, and now there's an opportunity to do it on their own and bootstrap it," he says.

Ming S. Liu, a scientist who toiled for close to 15 years at a medical-device company before launching a biotech company two years ago, says Larta's Entrepreneurship 101 courses have been like a mini-MBA program for him. The course on making investor presentations gave him insight into tailoring his pitch to a prospective customer or potential investor. A key lesson for Mr. Liu: "Good technology isn't good enough to make a successful company," he says.

Not that every student finds what he or she is looking for -- a reminder, participants say, that entrepreneurial programs often look or sound the same, but may well have a different focus.

Pete Fonda-Bonhardi, 55 years old, owner of a tiny Los Angeles turbo machinery design company and an alumnus of the Larta program, says that while he learned a lot, he found the program placed too much emphasis on going public. Many of the instructors were venture capitalists or had some connection to initial public offerings, he says.

"Larta unfortunately was sucked up in the IPO craze," says Mr. Fonda-Bonhardi, who attended the program from the fall of 2000 to the spring of 2001, while the dot-com bubble was still in the process of deflating. Larta was "focused on getting small tech firms in shape for their first venture-capital infusion, to be followed in short order by a second larger investment, to be followed by a third, larger capitalization, to be followed by an IPO," he says. Today what most entrepreneurs need, he adds, "are specialists in the long-term sustenance of slow growth, long gestation periods and slow commercial adoption."

Larta's Mr. Shukla concedes that the program began during the dot-com rush and partly reflected an age when venture-capital funds were flowing and anyone with a halfway decent idea could get funding. But at its foundation, he continues, the Larta curriculum has always been about promoting fiscal discipline and understanding one's market. "We continue to push to make our companies and clients more competitive in an environment which is more sour now," he says.

Fasttrac

Other programs offer a more generalist approach. The FastTrac program has multiple tracks that include formal mentoring and mapping out a "three-year strategic vision" for a small business. Originally started by two professors at the University of Southern California in 1986, FastTrac has grown into a national program that has trained more than 100,000 people in the past decade.

Classes meet weekly over nine to 11 weeks. Prices vary, depending on locality and local sponsorships, but participants can expect to pay $300 to $800. Instructors, who are past or present small-business owners, are called "facilitators." They undergo training and are certified by the Kauffman Foundation.

Judith Cone, a Kauffman vice president, says FastTrac gives participants a step-by-step approach to starting a business, one that involves working out ideas on paper before investing a dollar. For some, the process means discovering that they aren't ready for the challenge or that market conditions aren't right.

"To find that out before you take a second mortgage out on your house is very important," Ms. Cone says.

Mr. Moose, who attended the FastTrac program in Kutztown, left his job as a vice president at Cigna Corp. last fall by "mutual agreement," he says. Rather than try to find a job with the same salary and perks, he considered self-employment. His idea: Given his background in accounting and an interest in art, he envisioned providing financial services to architects, interior decorators and artists.

Part of the FastTrac program required him to analyze the potential market for his business.

"There's a lot of information out there," he says, referring to his hours spent doing research on the Internet. "But you have to pull pieces together from different places, and I wasn't getting there as quickly as I would've liked."

As a result, Mr. Moose realized that in the current economic climate, it might not be wise to start a business from scratch with no established customer base. He has a wife and two college-age sons depending on him. Accordingly, he is weighing whether to buy an existing accounting practice, reasoning that he might get "a better earnings stream" much faster than he would on his own.

SBDC

On the government side, many career-changers find help at the Small Business Administration's Small Business Development Centers, located in every state. These centers may be better suited to entrepreneurs who want insight into navigating the world of government contracts and crave access to a network of other active entrepreneurs.

Depending on the state, the centers can be very busy handling clients. But the plus side -- particularly for first-time entrepreneurs -- is the opportunity to make many contacts in the private and public sectors. Last year the New Jersey SBDC served almost 21,000 clients, ran 724 training events and helped students tap into $41 million in loans and grants.

Harris Goldberg is president of InMat, a Hillsborough, N.J., company that develops flexible coatings used commercially for such things as tires and tennis balls. Dr. Goldberg, who holds a Ph.D. in physics, hooked up with the technology arm of the New Jersey SBDC three years ago after he and his business partner, Carrie Feeney, left their employer as part of a reorganization. While he says he and Dr. Feeney, a chemist, "had a pretty good idea of what we were doing," both felt it was important to seek help on how to launch the business.

The two had secured the transfer of patents and technology from their previous employer and had also persuaded the company to finance their equipment. But Dr. Goldberg says he needed someone who could give him a detailed roadmap on potential potholes, shortcuts and direct links to investors. That someone was Randy Harmon at the SBDC, who gave him networking suggestions and, in a few instances, paved the way with meaningful introductions.

In 2000, when InMat needed to raise seed capital, Mr. Harmon told Dr. Goldberg about a federal program. It was crunch time because Drs. Goldberg and Feeney had funded the company themselves using their severance package, and their funds were running out.

"Randy provided an introduction that got the process going and that speeded the whole thing," Dr. Goldberg says. "We would have lost six months and not had enough money to keep running" if Mr. Harmon hadn't intervened.

For example, Dr. Goldberg says that when he initially attempted to get a federal grant from the Department of Defense for early-stage research and development, the guidance on the government Web site about how to apply wasn't clear. InMat didn't get the grant it wanted. Fortunately, however, Mr. Harmon had recently started a grant-proposal writing course and had lined up money to hire consultants to help entrepreneurs like Dr. Goldberg write their proposals. And that course, Dr. Goldberg says, "gave us much better advice" on how to write a successful grant. "This was an area where small companies could use help."

To date, InMat, has secured $70,000 from the Department of Defense program and has submitted a second proposal requesting $700,000.