Retirement is meant to be the reward for a lifetime of corporate slog: long lunches, a forgiving handicap and the freedom to ignore a Monday morning inbox. For a small but growing band of senior British executives, however, the gilded sunset has proved rather less golden than the brochure suggested.
Bored, restless and quietly itching for a problem to solve, they have done what their younger colleagues might find unthinkable. They have gone back to work, and, more often than not, they are doing it for free.
The Sapient Foundation, set up last year, is the brainchild of Brendan Logan, a 72-year-old serial entrepreneur with three decades in telecommunications and four start-ups to his name. The trigger was a conversation with his old friend Larry Quinn, 69, who had reluctantly agreed to advise a local golf club on its governance, despite, as Logan tells it, having no interest whatsoever in the game. The reason? He had, in his own words, “nothing else to do”.
Quinn, who has co-founded and exited eight businesses, was clearly wasted on bunker disputes. Logan rounded up two more retirees of equal vintage: Eden Phillips, 61, formerly a software engineering manager at BT, and Mary Whatman, 62, a transformation specialist whose CV includes Bell Canada and Nortel. The Sapient Foundation was born.
In the year since, the quartet has worked with just over a dozen companies stretched across the UK and beyond. The model is unusual. Sapient looks at a client’s balance sheet, decides what the business can realistically afford, and charges accordingly. In several cases there is no upfront fee at all; instead, founders are asked to make a donation to one of the charities Sapient supports, but only once their company is generating revenue.
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