If you’ve ever thought that the 9-5 grind just doesn’t suit you, turning a passion into a business could be the answer. Becoming a business owner can be a tough journey, but when it creates the job you want doing something you love, the payoff is high.
Did you know that the number of self-employed workers aged 60 and over reached a record high of 991,432 in 2023? This age group is filled with those who got bored with retirement, who want to share their lifeskills, and who intend to top up their retirement fund.
Shashi had been retired for five years when, in December 2012, her son Sanjay suggested she use her culinary skills to set up Spice Kitchen with him. What started out as a retirement hobby for his mum turned into an award-winning full-time business. The Spice Kitchen started out with spice tins, and now offers lots more such as spiced chocolate bars – as well as a cookery book.
The business offers a living wage to the whole team, uses only ethically sourced spices, and donates a meal to a school child in the UK or India with every spice tin purchase. All because Shashi found retirement too quiet!
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It’s easy to think that you need a wide market audience to make your business a success. However, spotting a problem in a niche demographic or industry is the way to turn your passion into a full-time job. Finding a solution to something that people need solving – whether they know it was a problem or not – is the key. If you can do something to make people’s lives easier in some way, you’re on the road to success.
Kristijan Salijević started GameBoost after coaching some friends in League of Legends just for fun. But it became a regular thing – and soon word of mouth spread, and other gamers were contacting him out of the blue to offer money for his coaching services.
He already had a background in development, so was able to build a basic site himself. He used his knowledge of the gaming world to pull together a team of high-ranked players who could also offer their coaching services, and with a tiny budget of €500 and the use of free tools like Discord and Google Sheets, the business was born.
The first tool developed was a free browser extension for any player to use, which provided live match data and personalised tips. This brought over 10,000 users to the company, without any marketing spend. The GameBoost platform now helps gamers all over the world and is Kristijan’s full-time business.
If your hobby or interest is starting to feel a bit bland and uninteresting, it could be because other brands have become a homogenous blob that all seem the same. Going out on a limb to do something different can be the thing that sparks your business into life.
Karl Neale is an engineer by trade but created Rebel Aromas after a friend who knew he had a nose for scent asked him to recreate his favourite designer perfume without the price tag. With an engineer’s brain, he approached perfumery, breaking down the elements, seeing what each bit did, then building it back together.
With a bootstrap budget at the start, he used leftover glass bottles from a friend’s candle making business, printed labels at home on his old printer, and ordered tiny batches of ingredients. At first, he could only make ten bottles at a time, packing orders from his kitchen table.
He went viral with one idea that started as a joke, ‘Scents by Star Sign’, his video walkthrough of building the Pisces scent picked up on TikTok and that was the start of the big business. Some of his bestsellers are unusual scents, like Engineer’s Grease. “I didn’t have investors, just stubbornness. Engineering gave me the skills, but the weird hobby gave me the outlet.”
There are lots of stories of brands using waste elements of an industry to create a new product. You can even see it in supermarkets these days with their ‘wonky veg’ boxes.
Joseph Holman’s Green Doors business started as a side hustle, after spotting a set of French doors in a skip. He rescued and revived them, before reselling. “I saw this as a great way to make money and make an impact, so I started trawling skips looking for items to resell. One day, I spotted a mountain of goods outside a door and window shop and rescued the lot – I reinvested the profits into more stock.”
Joseph is a prime example of spotting a niche, working on a budget, but also finding an ethical angle that appeals to many customers. Green Doors has now been in business for ten years, has a £2m turnover and employs over 20 staff.
If you’re without investors, savings, and any cash to spend, bootstrapping might be difficult if you need components to manufacture the product you want to sell. Crowdfunding on sites like Kickstarter can make all the difference in providing development and setup money to get your idea off the ground.
Sophie King started Soki London, a fragrance brand, in 2022 but the seed was planted much earlier. Always inspired by perfumes and scents from those her father brought back from international trips when she was a child, she found a job at an independent perfumery while studying for her degree. There, she learned the ropes and discovered the knowledge required to create her own brand.
When she had bacterial meningitis and septicaemia, she knew she had to leave her corporate career behind and follow her creative dream. She started out with a fragrance review YouTube channel in 2015 which helped build her audience. In 2022, she launched a Kickstarter to create her Soki London brand, with the aim of making luxury perfume more accessible and inclusive.
While having a safety net is a good way to start a business, not everyone is in the position to save up for years before they turn to their passion for work. They might be a student, unable to find work that they can manage with fluctuating health conditions, or simply just be on a low income unable to set cash aside for their dream. What people can do in this situation, however, is make the most of the time they have, instead. Their business plan should be long-term and realistic about what can be done in the time they have each week.
It is better to start small and build up over time, testing strategies one at a time to find out what works rather than throwing everything at it and burning out within a few months. Victoria Harris, 25, started selling vintage clothing as a final year student at Leeds Trinity University. She discovered she has a great eye for vintage clothing, snapping up bargains in charity shops before selling them on for profit.
Victoria realised that her small hobby was growing – and it was ideal, because her cystic fibrosis meant it was challenging to find a job that was flexible around her needs. As she grew, finding stock became more of a challenge, until she found Fleek in September 2023. The platform suited her needs and became her main marketplace, allowing her to curate specific collections for her online store Miilk, as well as run some successful pop-up shops.
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