Making a midlife career switch
Fiona Mcintosh explains what drove her, at the age of 46, to abandon a highly successful office-based career and launch her own business
When I began my career as a 17-year-old on a local newspaper, I worked on a typewriter and recorded interviews on a cassette player. An apple product was something I ate with ice cream. If my 1984 self could see my 2019 self, she would thing
I had been smoking something.
Today, I am part of the founding team of a tech company called blow LTD, which delivers beauty services to your home on an app. It involves a large tech team, digital marketing processes, and content is created not for the pages of a newspaper, but Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Linkedin.
There are moments when I look at the sea of dewy faces sitting in our meetings and think: “What the heck am I doing here?” I am a refugee from the analogue world trying to get down with the kids.
But despite the techspeak, what I do now hasn’t fundamentally changed from what I did all those years ago. It’s about communication. Throughout my career as a journalist and editor, at Company, Elle and Grazia, I learnt how to engage an audience. Now those skills are helping me to engage 75,000 customers, 1,000 beauty professionals and investors in our brand.
As a headhunter I met at a conference recently told me, you should never lose sight of your core strengths. She “self-identifies” as a networker; she could put herself to use in any job as long as it involves connecting people. Recognising your innate skill and trading on it is essential to adapting your career to these fast-moving times.
I know that as a mid-lifer, it’s easy to think there’s no longer a place for us. That was certainly at the back of my mind when I made the leap from journalist to entrepreneur aged 46. It was the bravest thing I’ve ever done. But it came in a point in my life when I thought: “If I don’t do my own thing now, then when?” My daughters were older (they’re now 19 and 17) and I had the feeling that, if I wasn’t quite standing at the bar of the last-chance saloon, I needed a last, big gig.
Not everyone saw it that way. As a friend told me at the time: “Are you crazy? Everyone knows start-ups are launched by 22-year-olds.” Thankfully, she was wrong.
Despite all the fairy stories about tech unicorns – Mark Zuckerberg, starting Facebook at 19 and Evan Spiegel launching Snapchat at 21
– a recent US study found they are anomalies. The average age for an entrepreneur to launch a business is 40. Even more tellingly, the average age of leaders of high-growth start-ups is 45, and people over 55 are twice as likely to launch a high-growth start-up than under-35s.
As Adeo Ressi, CEO of the Founder Institute, says: “Older age is actually a better predictor of entrepreneurial success.” He has concluded that older people have seen first-hand what works and what doesn’t in business, and have invaluable experience managing real life projects, from buying a house to raising children.
We mid-lifers have also built, over time, a strong network, which is invaluable when starting a business. So never underestimate all those years of hard graft and after-work drinks. As Malcolm Gladwell writes, you need to work at a skill for 10,000 hours before you can call yourself an expert.
And while being older may mean you have less energy, it also means you have less of an ego. All those brazen edges have been worn down by life. You get to the point where you learn not just what you are good at, but recognise and admit what you are not. That was certainly the case when we launched blow LTD. There is no way I would have attempted to set up a business on my own. My co-founder Dharmash Mistry is a whizz when it comes to business and tech, so we have polar-opposite skill sets.
Dharmash and I put together a business plan and a Powerpoint presentation on the concept, then approached a number of angel investors. His experience investing in tech start-ups was crucial to piquing their interest, while my connections in the media certainly helped our pitch. We raised £1.7million in the first seed round in early 2013 and had launched the business by November that year.
As it grew, we recruited a young team who knew more than we did in specific areas, and I am constantly learning from them. Sometimes, I have to hold myself back from saying wearily “That won’t work; we’ve tried it before.” Because, who knows, perhaps they have fresh insight? We also have a much more collaborative way of working than in the “olden days” when the boss was a quasidictator. Now the best idea wins, regardless of whose it is.
But there are still moments when I can show them a thing or two. At a company party we played table tennis and, despite my advanced years, I managed to win the tournament. All those hours of practice in my school holidays finally paid off. I call that a tangible competitive advantage.