'It’s never too late': How 3 founders launched successful businesses later in life

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“It’s never too late”: How 3 founders launched successful businesses later in life

One of the best parts of entrepreneurship is that it doesn’t come with an expiration date. If you have a great idea and the passion to see it through, it’s never too late to bring it to life. In fact, folks who are 55 and older own more than half of America’s businesses, according to the latest data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

As an entrepreneur, having some experience under your belt can actually be one of your biggest assets. Chances are you’ve honed valuable skills that will make you a stronger business owner. In other words, your past work and life experiences have likely prepared you for entrepreneurship.

Starting a business as a second act may look like a major career move or simply monetizing a passion or hobby you enjoy. It could fulfill a long-held goal of making an impact, leaving a legacy, or finding the flexibility outside of a standard 9-to-5 to live life on your schedule. Shopify talked to founders who launched their businesses later in life—and their stories might inspire you to take the leap.

Follow your passion

The age-old advice to follow your passion may sound overdone, but it could lead to a fulfilling new chapter. After working for 16 years in the mortgage industry, Sonja Detrinidad became disenchanted with the go-go-go speed of the work. The turning point came when a real estate agent called her on a Sunday afternoon with an urgent work request. The expectation was that she would drop everything, including her personal time, to accommodate it.

At 48, Detrinidad left her job to lean into something that had always brought her joy—plants. “There are pictures of me as a little girl hanging around in the garden with my grandmother,” she says. “I was always surrounded by plants.” This passion found the perfect outlet when she moved to a new house that required a major landscaping overhaul. Detrinidad made an art out of finding free plants on Craigslist, and blogged about it along the way.

Before long, she’d built a loyal following as a professional plant shopper. These days, she’s at the helm of Partly Sunny Projects, a business that ships plants and accessories to customers nationwide—and she’s never been happier.

“I think it’s never too late because never in the history of your life have you been this old and known this much,” Detrinidad says. “You have the experience that maybe a 20-year-old or 35-year-old version of you didn’t have.”

That doesn’t mean there isn’t a learning curve, but working for herself has brought Detrinidad the professional freedom and satisfaction she always craved.

Use industry experience to go your own way

If you’ve worked in the same industry for years, you likely have a wealth of knowledge and experience to draw on. That could be one of your most powerful resources. Before launching the clean skin care brand Tower 28, Amy Liu had worked in the beauty industry for two decades.

“When I started Tower 28, I was actually 40 years old, so I did it much later in my career,” Liu says on Shopify Masters.

During her corporate career, she grew her professional network and got to know some of the biggest players in the industry. Liu was always drawn to entrepreneurship but decided early on to learn from everything the established brands were doing before starting her own.

“I went to go work for other people because I told myself, ’I’m going to learn on someone else’s dime. I’m going to learn from everything they’re doing,’” she says. “And I actually think that was a great thing for me. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with [starting a business] early, but for me, it helped me build up that confidence. And I’m going to make my own mistakes, but I feel like as a result of that, I’m trying to at least not make the same mistakes that I saw.”

Because Liu had made a name for herself within the beauty industry, she also had an easier time securing funding and retail partnerships with Credo and Sephora.

“I feel like I had maybe the easiest time fundraising of anyone I’ve ever known,” she says of the pre-launch fundraising she secured from friends and family. “I think it was very much based on just who I am and my background.”

Another big part of her success was her willingness to share her vision with others—as early as her business school days—which she acknowledges can be scary for new entrepreneurs, but has the potential to pay off big.

“When I finally went to go raise money and I turned to people, so many people came to me and said, ‘Hey, I know you’ve been wanting to do this. I’ve been waiting for you. You’ve been saying this forever. Finally. Let me invest,’” says Liu. “And that was a huge vote of confidence for me.”

Learn from past missteps and stay adaptable

Dusting yourself off and forging ahead after failure can go a long way as a business owner. That resilience is what helped Danny Winer turn HexClad, which he began building at 49, into a multimillion-dollar kitchenware brand.

“It’s OK to fail,” says Winer. “It’s how you react to that failure, and how do you look at it and then go, ‘What is truly my role in this failure?’”

Winer first tried launching a juicer, but ultimately shuttered the project after he and his business partner realized they misjudged the market. Rather than getting discouraged, he chose to see those challenges as opportunities—and apply them to his next idea: hybrid cookware.

“I knew the pain points the consumer had, because I’d done it for years,” Winer says, referring to his prior career in the cookware industry. While attending a trade show in Asia, he connected with a man who invented a laser-etched, hexagon-shaped, non-stick cookware coating. He knew he’d found something special, but it took time—and a lot of no’s—to convince others that a direct-to-consumer cookware company was worth investing in.

“In the beginning, it wasn’t resonating,” says Winer. “Everybody laughed at me when I went to try and raise money and say, ‘We’re going to be a DTC cookware company.’ Nobody had ever done that yet.”

Winer saw those criticisms not as a failure, but as an opportunity to fine-tune the brand’s messaging. “I was able to take the learnings in those rooms and turn those into some good Facebook ads,” he says.

HexClad launched in 2016 and was perfectly positioned when the pandemic hit in 2020 to provide the wave of new home cooks with the tools they needed—all online. The brand also caught the attention of celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay, who came on as a brand partner in 2021. The mega-popular brand is now marketed to professional chefs and home cooks.

“I’m not saying I’m smarter than a 25-year-old, but I’m guaranteeing I’m wiser,” Winer says. “And you can learn from my wisdom, because all the mistakes you’re gonna make from 25 to 40, I made them.”

This story was produced by Shopify and reviewed and distributed by Stacker.