Launching as part of Business Growth West Midlands Investment Readiness Programme and funded by the West Midlands Combined Authority (WMCA), the initiative is looking to help 60 people aged 50 and over to start or develop their own business.
The programme offers a bespoke five week in-person course delivered by Oxford Innovation Advice, aiming to create an environment where like-minded individuals can work together to boost skillsets, explore sales and marketing and, importantly, understand the different funding options available to them.
Silver Founders said that the initiative is looking to address the growing number of over 50s in the UK, which currently stands at 10.4m – a 2.4m increase on the last decade.
The organisation said that some of these over 50s are struggling to get back into employment after redundancy, want a fresh career change or are keen to pour years of knowledge into their own venture.
“There are so many good ideas, so much experience and so much business passion among the over 50s that goes unnoticed – that’s why we wanted to create Silver Founders and bring it to potential entrepreneurs or early-stage manufacturers in Birmingham, Solihull and the Black Country,” Vernon Hogg of Oxford Innovation Advice, who has over five years’ experience in this specialist field, said in a statement.
More from Skills and Careers
“The current generation of Silver Founders are more comfortable with technology and need to prolong their working lives because their pension pots are not sufficient to support them.
“Some also find it harder to get back into the workplace after redundancy - finding age discrimination as a contentious issue in applying for new work, so are attracted to entrepreneurship. This is where we come in.”
Silver Founders, which is being delivered in partnership with the British Business Bank, starts with an onboarding session and introduction with the emphasis on community building, identifying shared issues and addressing some of the business support organisations who may be able to help along the way.
The next four weeks focus on how to access finance, business structures and planning, cashflow forecasting, scaling-up and the importance of networking, social media and marketing. Direct referrals to organisations that can help entrepreneurs are made throughout the course.
“Silver Founders is based on the hugely successful Founders Collective Programme we have been running since 2022 – with a few specialist tweaks,” added Hogg.
“In the previous two years, we have supported 250 entrepreneurs to launch and helped them raise almost £2.4m of external funding. We’re hoping we can do the same for the raft of older manufacturing leaders in Birmingham, Solihull and the Black Country, creating a vibrant and interactive community that will capture and build on the talent we know is definitely out there.”
