Opening the door to new opportunities at any age
Would you join the back to work brigade? Around 25 pc of UK retirees now return to work.
Many choose to set up in business. The over-50s make up 43 pc of new entrepreneurs, the largest group in age terms, according to office for National Statistics figures. By age 70, almost 60 per cent of those still working are self-employed.
Some are driven back to earning by lack of income, but plenty are also lured back by the fun and challenge of work.
‘I semi-retired from my last business two years ago but to be honest I’ve become a little bit bored since then, so I started looking for a new opportunity, says Robert Wood, 62.
‘I looked into dream doors and the opportunity it presents, and all the numbers added up, so I asked my friend Andy Earnshaw if he fancied coming in on it with me.’
The pair have been friends since they were nine, playing football together as children and even running their own mobile DJ business in their teens.
‘We’ve worked together before, so he knows what he’s getting into,’ says Robert.
Andy, 62, says: ‘I’ve been a company director before and the idea for me has always been to grow the business so that I become redundant. I accomplished that in my last role, but my wife had started prodding me and saying: ‘What are you going to do next?’
The pair now run dream doors Huddersfield and Halifax, in West Yorkshire. Both were attracted by the fact that a franchise offered a ready-made, proven business model.
Andy says: ‘You can spend years trying to devise a business model and a valuable proposition to take to the market, but we don’t have to do that here; we can just focus on running the business using the dream doors model.’ The franchise costs £35,000.
You can work while drawing state and private pensions provided certain criteria are met.
See dreamdoorsfranchise.co.uk and for pension advice, go to gov.uk.