Launching a new business just before a recession could be fool hardly, brave or just create bad timing. But older people who set out to create a business have and advantage whatever the financial climate. Maturity gives them the experience and the self-confidence to allow instinct and intuition to play a part in their most crucial decisions.
The following business people, whose career changes n their fifties and sixties coincided with the end of the boom and the beginning of near bust, knew that they needed to make radical changes in their lives. They wanted the freedom to work hard at something they enjoyed and were good at. And they provided that if you believe passionately in what you are doing , not even the worst economic conditions in 80 years can hold you back.
Simeone Salik, co-founder of Blindsinabox launched early 2008.
Before her marriage in 1963, Simeone Salik work in the PR and marketing office of Liberty’s department store in London’s Regent Street. She continued to do so until the birth of her first daughter 9now 44 with three children).
“It was the norm in the early Sixties for a woman to stay at home and look after the children,” she says. “ We had two more daughters – now 41 and 39 with five children between them – over the next seven and half years brought them up myself. However, when the first went off to university, I decided to work with my husband, Gordon, an optometrist who worked together until he was about to retire in late 2003 at the age of 65.
“We had decided to downsize our home and were lucky enough to buy a plot of land in North London. We built ourselves a ‘retirement’ chalet-bungalow incorporating all the equipment we felt might be necessary in our old age – raised toilets, shower seats easy handles in the kitchen etc.”
Curtains were the very last thing that she and her husband thought about as they furnished their new home. As an interim measure she tried to obtain temporary blinds, easily installable ones, but they proved impossible to find. Remembering some she had seen abroad, it suddenly occurred to her that she had stumbled on a gap in the market.
The beauty of the idea lay in its simplicity. Available in just one size (3ft wide and 6ft long) and two colours, white for the general use and black for the total blackout, the pleated blinds cost £39.10 for a box of six and were easily trimmable with a utility knife. No other tools were needed – they peeled and stuck and had two clips per blind for opening and closing.
“At first we started to sell over the internet in a modest but encouraging way, and I discovered that my PR skills returned to me like riding a bike,” Simeone recalls. “We were mentioned in the national and regional papers where a scot for BBC saw us and asked us to apply to appear on Dragons Den, the BBC2 show for budding entrepreneurs.
Initially we said no but were persuaded to do so and appeared on the show September 1, 2008. Two of the ‘Dragons’ Duncan Bannatyne and James Cann, invested into us and our business, one year from going into the Den, is flourishing. On the programme our first years projected turnover was £50,000. In fact we turned over £120,000 in that year and now will be distributed in Spain, Germany, South Africa, Southern Ireland, Australia, and the UK. We are also stocked in the Argos stores.”
Asked to identify her principal motivation for going into business in her late sixties, just as the recession began to bite. Simeone, 67, replies candidly: “I wanted to have some means of combating the deficit in our pensions and savings that the Government and economic conditions have caused us, and i do hope i have found a means of doing so.
“I would also say to people of retirement age that working keeps your brain active, gives your children and grandchildren a reason to be proud of you, and makes you a real part of the 21st century.”
Blindsinabox, 020 8445 8699, www.blindsinabox.co.uk
