Who says entrepreneurship is only for millennials? You won’t believe how old some of the founders of famous companies today were when they first got started. It’s never too late for an encore business!
GEICO (Leo Goodwin Sr. at 50)
The son of a country doctor, Goodwin started his career as an accountant at an insurance company in Texas. While working, he realized he could potentially deal directly with customers instead of being a middleman. Founding GEICO in 1936 at age 50, Goodwin worked with his wife for 12 hours a day until the company finally realized its first profit in 1940.
Starbucks (Gordon Bowker at 51)
In 1971, three former University of San Francisco students named Jerry Baldwin, Zev Siegl and Gordon Bowker (then 51 years old) opened the first Starbucks in Seattle, Washington. The originally humble beginnings – selling high quality coffee beans and roasting equipment – grew until Howard Schultz bought out the company and began its rapid expansion.
McDonald’s (Ray Kroc at 52)
Ray Kroc was struggling as a Prince Castle Multi-Mixer salesman when, in 1954 at the age of 52, he happened upon Richard and Maurice McDonald’s hamburger shop in San Bernardino. Kroc saw opportunity in that shop and offered to help, becoming McDonald’s first national franchising agent – and six years later bought out the founding brothers.
Huffington Post (Arianna Huffington at 54)
The Huffington Post was co-founded by Arianna Huffington (then 54) and former AOL executive Kenneth Lerer. The Huffington Post was meant to be the liberal answer to the Drudge Report, focusing on speed and strength as a news “aggregator”, and over time has produced its own original journalism and become one of the most popular political sites in the world.
Coca Cola (John Pemberton at 55)
During the Civil War, wounded soldiers were often treated with morphine. But a Georgian pharmacist and physician named John Pemberton had something better: Pemberton’s French Wine Coca. When Atlanta passed new temperance legislation, he was forced to reformulate his beverage. With help from his son, he replaced the wine with sugar, forming the Coca-Cola company at age 55.
Kawazaki (Kawasaki Shozo at 59)
Born to a kimono merchant, Shozo Kawasaki became a tradesman at the age of 17. In his twenties, he started a shipping business which failed when his cargo ship sank in a storm. Later, he joined a shipping company transporting sugar to Japan. Having experienced many sea accidents in his life, Kawasaki trusted Western ships and became interested in shipbuilding, and at age 59 established Kawasaki Tsukiji Shipyard which marked the beginning of today’s conglomerate.
KFC (Col. Harland David Sanders at 62)
Born in 1890, Harland Sanders grew up on a farm and spent the first half of his life working a series of odd jobs, from a stint in the Army to selling tires to to stoking the steam engines of trains in the South. A decade after buying a service station in Kentucky and serving classic Southern dishes to travelers, he had a cooking breakthrough – and two decades after that, at the age of 62, Kentucky Fried Chicken finally began to expand and franchise.
Suffix Magazine 