For years, entrepreneurship in the UK has been framed as a young person’s game, hoodie-wearing founders chasing venture capital, rapid scale and unicorn status. But quietly, and in growing numbers, a different kind of entrepreneur is emerging: the olderpreneur.
These are people in their 50s, 60s and beyond who are starting businesses, switching careers or building new ventures later in life — not despite their age, but because of it. Far from winding down, they are reframing experience as a commercial asset and challenging the idea that innovation belongs to the young.
Reinvention after disruption
For Denise Yeats, the shift was forced rather than planned. When the pandemic shut down the events industry in 2020, her business disappeared overnight. She was 52.
Almost six years later, she has rebuilt her career as an IRONMAN-certified coach, personal trainer and menopause specialist, working with organisations including BT Group, the Met Police and LabCorp.
“Rather than seeing my age as a barrier, I recognised it as my superpower,” she says. “Who better to help women navigate perimenopause and menopause than someone living it?”
Her business now combines one-to-one coaching with corporate programmes on menopause in the workplace, a niche rooted directly in lived experience. “At 30, I wouldn’t have had the confidence to back myself in this way,” she adds. “Decades of professional experience, an established network and self-belief make a huge difference.”
Building businesses on lived experience
That theme runs through many olderpreneur stories. Sarah Gatford launched her coaching practice in her late 50s after three decades as a British Sign Language interpreter. At 58, she completed an MSc in Applied Positive Psychology and Coaching Psychology.
“My age and experience are my edge,” she says. “Clients trust me because I’ve lived through complexity. Three decades of relationships become capital you simply can’t manufacture in your 20s.”
Her work focuses on people navigating transitions — redundancy, identity shifts and life after long careers. “Experience isn’t baggage,” she says. “It’s the product.”
A response to redundancy and age bias
For some, entrepreneurship is also a response to age discrimination. Jon Crocker, founder of Manchester-based ICENI Mastermind Group, says starting new ventures later in life can be as much about freedom as opportunity.
“I’m 59 and launching a new UK-Germany hybrid service,” he says. “Businesses seem to assume people my age aren’t technically competent. That makes you unemployable, but it also makes you entrepreneurial.”
The challenges are real: financial risk, fewer peer networks and scepticism from friends and family. But Crocker argues the advantages outweigh them. “You care less about what people think, you’ve got gravitas, and you know how to survive uncertainty.”
Franchising and the rise of later-life self-employment
Some olderpreneurs are turning to franchising as a lower-risk route into business ownership. Paul Harrison, co-founder of The Travel Franchise, says a significant proportion of its 750-plus home-based consultants are over 50.
“Many were made redundant in their 50s or 60s,” he says. “They’re building pension pots while enjoying a better lifestyle. Working later in life shouldn’t be about counting down pay cheques, it should be about doing something you enjoy.”
For Marietta Maidman, redundancy at 59 became a turning point. She now runs a travel consultancy from home and has used the income to build a retirement property in Cyprus.
“Age discrimination can’t affect you when you’re your own boss,” she says. “I use my long-established contacts and run my business on my terms. I’m never going back to employed work.”
A structural shift, not a trend
Suzanne Noble, co-director of Startup School for Seniors, says the data backs up these anecdotes. “One in five people aged over 50 are now freelance, more than any other age group,” she says. Her government-funded programme has supported more than 600 over-50s to turn ideas into businesses since 2020.
Clinical psychologist Dr Marianne Trent believes olderpreneurs are often finally pursuing ambitions postponed earlier in life. “People don’t always get to follow their calling when they’re younger,” she says. “It’s powerful to see the narrative shifting to ‘it’s never too late’.”
The quiet advantage
What unites these stories is not hustle culture or growth-at-all-costs thinking, but clarity. Olderpreneurs are more selective, more values-driven and less interested in external validation. They build businesses around expertise, trust and relationships, assets accumulated over decades.
In an economy obsessed with speed and scale, the olderpreneur offers a different model of success: slower, steadier and often more sustainable. Experience, it turns out, may be one of the most undervalued growth drivers in British business.
