Over-50s discover the joys of entrepreneurship

When Sarah Frame lost her younger son in 2019, her world was turned upside down. Sergeant Gordon Adam, who served with the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards, ended his life at 35 after a battle with depression. His mother, a business development executive, was 59.
Frame’s life changed “very dramatically” and she no longer felt able to keep up her high-pressure job. Instead, she decided to open a bookshop in her hometown of Stewarton, north of Kilmarnock, East Ayrshire.
“I was about to turn 60 and thought, ‘Why not? I’ve got to do something’. I wanted to make it easier to manage my own life and accommodate my grief, and have more time for my family, and I also wanted to do something that would have a positive impact on my community and on people’s mental health. That was really important to me as a way of dealing with what happened with my son.”
Frame had never owned a business before but knew how to put together a business plan and she used her savings to launch The Book Nook in early December 2020, two days after her 60th birthday. The second Covid-19 lockdown hit within weeks, so Frame sold online before reopening in 2021 with “no idea if anybody would come in or not”.
Realising that she couldn’t turn a profit on walk-ins alone, Frame leaned into an events model. She launched a book festival, hosted reading events and reached out to well-known authors, promising audiences for book tours. It worked.
The Book Nook, which employs two part-time staff, has since hosted novelists including Andrew O’Hagan, the Booker prize nominee, and attracts 100-strong crowds “from miles around”. In March this year the shop was named independent bookshop of the year for Scotland.
“You’ve no idea how amazed I was — I had zero expectation of winning,” Frame, now 63, said. “It’s had a very positive impact on the business.”
Frame said the bookshop reached profitability this year, despite the founder keeping all events free to ensure accessibility. The bookseller also met her new partner, Douglas Skelton, the Scottish crime writer, through the store.
“It’s been a whole new chapter in life,” she said. “When I lost my son, I didn’t think I could get up off the floor, let alone anything else… Starting a business at 60 helped me manage a tragic situation, and I hope it can make people think, ‘It’s never too late, it’s worth a try’.”
Frame is part of a growing cohort of people starting companies for the first time after 50, often as an alternative to retiring.
Enterprise Nation’s most recent Small Business Barometer shows 43 per cent of businesses are now started or run by people over 50, up from 35 per cent in mid-2023, while latest industry studies show workers aged 60 and over now make up 23 per cent of the UK’s freelance economy.
Some over-50s founders feel they have little alternative after being made redundant in a job market that favours younger workers. Many under-pressure firms have made layoffs since 2022, and research published last week revealed that nearly half of recruiters think applicants become too old to be considered for a job at 57.
Suzanne Noble, 63, used to own a public relations agency before she launched the Start-up School for Seniors programme in 2020. It has since helped 530 people gain the business skills and confidence to turn ideas into viable companies. She highlighted a “huge increase” in the number of women signing up.
“It’s 90 per cent women on the course right now,” she said. ”There’s something happening — we’re not sure whether it’s [due to] more redundancies [among women].”
Other older founders report feeling emboldened to leave unsatisfying employment after finally paying off mortgages and becoming “empty nesters”.
Lyndsey Simpson, 46, is the founder of 55/Redefined, which provides services for workers over 50. She said the current “dominant trigger” for over-50s to start companies was their lack of job opportunities, or frustration at lack of “progression, fulfilment or flexibility in a current role”.
She added: “The great news is that 50-year-old founders are almost twice as likely to build a thriving enterprise when starting a firm than their 30-year-old counterparts… They’ve built up the wisdom, experience, skills and networks to deal with the highs and lows of setting up a business.”
Julie Macken, 54, is among those swapping unsatisfying jobs for start-up success after attaining “financial freedom”.
Macken launched Neve’s Bees, an Oxfordshire-based natural skincare company, at 50 after becoming disenchanted with her role as a marketing consultant. The realisation hit during a workshop in Sao Paulo, Brazil.
“We were teaching how to create marketing plans to convince mothers to stop using fresh potatoes and start buying frozen processed chips. I was just like, ‘What am I doing? I don’t believe in this’,” she said.
Macken was an amateur beekeeper and studied chemistry at university. She took a skincare course and began developing her own beeswax-based products. She felt confident because her children had left home, and she and husband, Ross, 56, had financial security from income on several rental properties.
Neve’s Bees now employs four contractors and is profitable, selling in local shops, online and at festivals including Glastonbury. Macken expects to turn over £120,000 this year and projects revenues of £250,000 within the next year or two.
“I think it’s easier to start a business when you’re older. I would never have done this when I was 20.”
Some over-50s founders are even willing to empty their savings to pursue fulfilling work and a healthier work-life balance.
Taania Wood, 59, from West Sussex, had developed ME/chronic fatigue syndrome after 20 years in a fast-paced IT programme management role. In 2018, she spent her savings on a licensed medical tattooing course. This qualified her to reconstruct areola for breast cancer survivors and make eyebrow tattoos for acid attack victims.
In 2020, Wood, then 53, took voluntary redundancy, using the funds to launch her business, Taania Wood Micropigmentation. “I thought, ‘If it doesn’t work out I’ll stack shelves for a living… if I don’t succeed I’ll know I tried’.”
Wood has since worked with several hundred clients on medical and cosmetic tattoos, and said she makes “enough to live on” most months. Learning to run a company has been hard, Wood said, but she is now receiving referrals from the private insurer Bupa and building an online presence.
“It’s so rewarding, doing this job. You really feel like you’re giving something to people, giving them some hope and confidence,” she said. “If I won the lottery tomorrow, I would still do it… I wish I’d done it sooner.”
Raising funding can be a challenge for over-50s founders, as venture capital, banks and accelerators typically target younger entrepreneurs. But many are starting out bootstrapping and hoping to prove their business models.
Ann-Janine Murtagh was executive publisher of HarperCollins Children’s Books, and has worked with authors including Michael Morpurgo and Judith Kerr. Murtagh launched her first venture in July, an agency for authors, illustrators and the intellectual property generation called Tall House Creative.
She is self-funding and said that while it felt like a risk to try something new, she was encouraged by her sons and younger colleagues “who are quite naturally entrepreneurial”.
“It gets a little bit harder when you’ve got to a certain status and position in your career to then be back at the start of something,” she said. “It’s not easy to start again… but the exhilaration of the new gives you an energy.
“Creativity is ageless.”