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Retire or start up?
When Richard and Rieta Murray upped sticks in their 50s and moved to a more rural part of Dorset it was nothing to do with downsizing for retirement. They simply needed to be nearer their new investment - a yoghurt dairy, writes Julie Goodhand
After their air conditioning business collapsed in the 1980s the couple found themselves, aged 50, out of work and out of cash. While helping a friend sell on an ailing sheep and goats' yoghurt business, Richard, pictured left, decided to take on the white elephant himself.
"If you’re doing anything, it's about analysing what the problem is and how to sort it out," Richard says of the unlikely leap from air con to dairy products.
Now in their seventies, the Murrays continue to run the now-transformed Woodlands Park Dairy, supplying health food shops and supermarkets across the UK, Ireland and the Gulf states, and have no plans to put their feet up anytime soon.
The Murrays are no go-getting phenomenon. With a trend for early retirement, but with many feeling unprepared, either mentally or financially, to give up work, the business start-up is no longer the preserve of bright, young things.
Alec Stewart (76), who launched his export business when he turned 55, says today's technology was a catalyst. "Thirty years ago I couldn’t have done it because communications were so poor and air travel was not so good. The circumstances enabled me to take the bull by the horns."
After receiving a golden handshake from CIBA-Geigy Pharmaceuticals, Alec used contacts made during 25 years as a Field Force Manager to begin FFPS (Caribbean), exporting the likes of toothbrushes, plant food and breakfast cereal to the Caribbean islands.
"That helps me not to retire," he says of his transatlantic business trips from his office in Bognor Regis to sunnier climes. "If I was working in the Congo, I think I probably would have retired a few years ago!"
Click here for part two
This article was created: 17 November 2006.
This article was last edited: 30 April 2007.
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