Why I quit my job to start a business from scratch
Female founders tell Helen Chandler-Wilde why leaving a top role to launch a new brand isn’t easy … but it’s worth it
Many people are motivated by job security and promotions. Not Shàà Wasmund, who left a good job with Dyson in favour of starting her own series of successful businesses.
The 47-year-old was one of James Dyson’s first employees. He hired her personally to handle the vacuum cleaner firm’s PR. She had the task of promoting a little-known inventor looking to take on a product so dominant that it had become a verb.
The company grew quickly over the five years she worked for Dyson, moving away from his kitchen table in Bath, hiring more people and selling internationally. She had the stability she had always wanted.
“I grew up really poor in a hostel for homeless families after I came to this country when I was 10,” Wasmund says. “[Those years] were the building blocks of wanting to be financially stable.”
But, for her, it felt as if job security came at the cost of doing something she really loved.
She decided to leave to start her own business, a social network for teenage girls called My Kinda Place. She sold it to BSKYB in 2007 in a deal thought to be worth in the single-digit millions. Wasmund then launched another social network, Smarta, in 2009, this time for entrepreneurs.
Now, she employs five people at her content creation company Shàà, which runs online networks, courses, workshops and blogs to help digital entrepreneurs. She has also put her advice into three books:
Stop Talking, Start Doing, published
in 2011, followed by Do Less, Get More, in 2015, and How to Fix Your S---, which came out a few weeks ago. “It’s so different now,” she says. “It’s not all rainbows and unicorns, but it’s 90 per cent better.”
Waiting until you are financially secure before you start out alone can be even more tempting for female entrepreneurs, knowing that the total value of investments in businesses with at least one female founder in 2018 was just 11.4 per cent of the total.
This was crucial for former Lancôme and L’oréal CEO Sue Y Nabi, who started her own skincare business Orveda with her savings, and money put in by her business partner Nicholas Vu. She says that using the wealth she’s acquired on her own business is much more satisfying than, say, buying a big property where you would just “be stressed whenever the wall gets a stain”. Her philosophy is “The more you own, the more stress there is, so use your money to grow something.”
Before starting Orveda, Nabi had spent 20 years working in beauty. She held some of the industry’s most prestigious jobs, worked on products which sold by the millions, rekindled the “because you’re worth it” tag-line, and befriended scores of A-listers who fronted the campaigns.
But, in 2013, she left to start from scratch. “Everyone told me I was making a mistake,” she laughs. “People just didn’t understand.” The 51-year-old says they couldn’t grasp why she would give up her great career, and the attendant luxuries such as first-class flights, to build a brand which is currently investing every penny made back into the business.
But, after decades in a big company, Nabi wanted the freedom to launch something totally new without the pressures that come with a heritage brand.
In 2017, after a few years of development, she launched Orveda, which makes luxury vegan skincare products. They are now stocked in Harvey Nichols and Saks.
While the perception may be that start-ups are the domain of twentysomethings, there is evidence to suggest that businesses started by people in mid- and later life are more successful. The average age for the most successful entrepreneurs is 45, and someone aged 50 is about twice as likely to start a very successful business than a 30-year-old, according to American research from MIT, Northwestern University and the US Census Bureau.
Nabi certainly feels this herself: “Sometimes I have so many things that stress me out, and I think, how do the young people who don’t have this experience do it? Someone like me, who has spent 20 years in the industry, knows all the best people.”
Charly Lester, 36, also spent years gathering experience and meeting people in her industry – online dating – before founding Lumen, a dating app for the over-fifties. She was working in banking when, at the age of 29, she started a blog about challenging herself to go on 30 first dates before her 30th birthday. It became so popular that she left her job, heading up the dating sites for two publications.
She noticed the same problems surfacing time and again. She was receiving a steady flow of messages from people in their thirties “asking on behalf of their parent who was divorced or widowed”. These people were having trouble meeting a new partner offline, and the online tools weren’t working either. “The apps out there were created for millennials,” says Lester. “Some of the apps you couldn’t even join after you’re a certain age.”
So when her co-founder, Antoine Argouges, came to her with the idea for Lumen, she was sold straight away. He, too, had steadily built up expertise in big companies, working for established dating apps Badoo and Bumble, before deciding to start from scratch. His connections were also crucial for the business: Lumen received millions of pounds of funding from Badoo founder Andrey Andreev.
Lester says that gaining experience before they started the company was critical. “I have a Swiss army knife skill set, which really suits being an entrepreneur,” she says. “I’ve done every job from running an international TV campaign to cleaning the floor. If someone is off for the day, I feel I could do their job. I am very hands-on.”
Experience isn’t a fast train to success, but it can certainly help when you’re starting a business. “Success is a recipe and nobody knows how it works,” says Nabi, “but [experience] helps you avoid the big mistakes which kill brilliant ideas.”
‘Everyone told me I was making a mistake. People just didn’t get it’