An ever-growing wave of “olderpreneurs” has suggested that British people don’t have to hang up their business boots when they hit the retirement age. Take McDonald’s founder Raymond Kroc, for example. He didn’t found the fast food chain until he was 52.
He’s far from being the only one. Here are five entrepreneurs who reveal how old aged helped them, and which problems got in the way.
Tony Palmer 52
At 52, Palmer was diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome.
“My employer knew what was going on, but I was dismissed and the Job Centre didnt give me much hope of finding a new job at that age,” he said. “Theres a bias towards younger people, so starting your own business can be the best option for many over-50s who lose their jobs.
After much thought, he decided to take his hobby, glass-engraving, and turn it into a viable business. It only took him six months, from being let go at work to the establishment of the business, to have Crystal Mountain Glass up and running.
I contacted PRIME first, because the charity provides advice about starting a business to the over-50s,” Palmer said. It was a good starting point. They advised me to contact other organisations such as HMRC,which offers seminars on VAT, starting your own business and keeping your own books.
Palmer explained that he hadn’t faced any age-related challenges .
During my career Ive done many jobs,” he said. This gave me a lot of experience I could bring to my business. I was an electrician; Ive worked in a warehouse; I worked for the ambulance service, too. In the jobs Ive done, I had loads of experience of working with computers and Ive done admin work, both of which have been very useful since Ive been running my own business.
Having self-funded his business, he never had to approach a bank for finance either. He noted that were he at a young age, specifically with theAdded pressure of young children , then he may have faced more hurdles along the way.
A younger person may have the added pressure of young children, which older business people dont usually have,” he said. Olderpreneurs also tend to be more cautious about managing money, Id say, which can be a great benefit.
Read more about olderpreneurs:
- The age of the “olderpreneur” is here
- Can “pension freedom” boost enterprise The options available for business leaders
- To the over 50s in business: Don’t throw in the towel
Carol Doyel 54
Previously, Doyel had been a successful estate agent for several years before the housing bubble burst in 2008. But she didn’t want to leave things at that. She decided to launch an online magazine at a time when many publications were going out of print.
“I’m an entrepreneur at heart and it seemed like a good time to start my own business,” she said.
Doyel has aimed her magazine at an audience she knows all too well: women over the age of 50.
“It’s a very desirable demographic,” she said. “Women aged 50-plus control a lot of wealth they may not own it, but they mostly make the decisions and manage that wealth. And as consumers they represent major buying decisions in almost every category from toilet paper to cars.”
The website, LivingBetter50, caters to a wide range of topics with articles offering advice from cutting a pomegranate to strategies for media interviews.
Doyel suggested that many readers, much like herself, are women prepared to start their “second act”.
“Their husbands have seen a reduction in income, or for business owners, a reduction in their revenue, and often that’s required women to step up,” she said. “Some of them become the bread winners. And there are many women who lose their spouses [through death or divorce] and are facing that challenge.”
Sam Taylor 71
Taylor was a successful businessman who retired at the age of 63 after his company floated on the stock market. However, eight years later he chose to swap the leisure life in Spain he had been saving for in order to start an online business in Scotland.
“Six months into retirement, I couldn’t really hack it. I was bored and I missed the buzz of business,” Taylor explained. He briefly dabbled in directorship roles and angel investment before deciding that he wanted to return to self-employment.
He said: During that time my wife was doing textile art and we got to a position where she had built up a considerable amount of material. We were talking one night and decided we needed to start selling some of it.
By combining his business experience with her artistic skills, they founded Creative Arts Gallery. The Gallery seeks to promote online the work of Scottish artists, designers and makers and now boasts more than 200 individual pieces by over 30 Scottish contemporary artists.
Co-founder Jo Taylor, aged 66 when the company was created, said: “The current trend towards online retailing offered a perfect opportunity to bring the work of Scottish artists to an appreciative global audience.”
But Primarily, Taylor suggested that their age played a pivotal part in their success.
“What you bring to the party at that age is your experience and contacts,” he explained. “We also knew we could work together because we have the best part of 30 years experience doing so. To us, age is no barrier at all. If you’re mentally alert and physically fit, there’s no reason why you can’t do it.”
Read on to find out how experience has helped olderpreneurs in the education and HR sectors.
Colin King 55
HMRC figureshighlighted that UK workers can expect their incomes to plummet by more than a third when they reach retirement. This was the reason why King decided to jump back into the world of work.
He suggested that you need to have saved up a large amount of money before retirement to “live reasonably well”. When he realised his family wouldn’t have enough finance, he started up his own business. Having previously worked as the owner of a garden centre, King found himself in a completely new direction: providing educational quizzes for school kids.
King admitted that although it was a gruelling affair, “it was a risk worth taking”.
“Whatever business you do, you’ve got to accept the fact that it might not go right,” Colin said. “When you get to my age, there’s not as many years to put it right again. So, in the early days of our business that was our main worry the fact that we might end up losing our money. But as we gradually spent more on the site and it became increasingly popular, it was evident that there was a market for what we were doing.”
Much like Taylor, Collin suggested that age brings experience. He explained that the ability to spot a “lucrative idea” was a skill that came with age. “Once you’ve been burnt two or three times”, he said, you “appreciate the need” to only develop “sound ideas”.
The myth of technology being a stumbling block for older Brits doesn’t prove true in this case either.
“Our particular business is all technology and over the last ten years it’s become essential to like it,” he said. “Fortunately that’s never been a problem for me, but friends of my age won’t even have a mobile phone and just don’t like the idea of it. So, you’ve got to have some sort of empathy with new tech and appreciate the value of some of these services out there. We wouldn’t have got our business off the ground without it.”
Paul Murray 63
Finance was also Murray’s main concern when he launched an HR consultancy.
“When I got to 60, I thought that was an appropriate time to look at my pension provisions, and I was dismayed to find that the pensions I had been paying into for about 30 years were only going to produce a fraction of what I was told when I took them out,” the former employment law advisor said.
Then in one fell swoop the government decided to move the retirement age forward nearly seven years. My wife is going to have to be nearly 67 before she can draw her pension.
Due to the success of his business, Murray keeps raising his annual targets. At the moment I feel I could work forever, and even at my age I have embraced technology,” he said. I worked out I needed just 12 clients to manage OK in a year. For my second year I moved my target to 15. And in my third year I raised the target to 20. My clients are all people who know me and value what I do.
He suggested that the first six of months of the business were the most difficult, having come awfully close to giving up during that time.
I have no idea about marketing, and of course the world has changed back in 1980 I got work through word of mouth,” he said. But when you are starting from scratch how do you get that first person in the first place
His first client came as he added his business to LinkedIn. Someone who he had once advised recognised his name and sent across a few messages.
