THE HELM TIMES

In 2017, Rory did what any sensible person does when their working life quietly implodes: he blamed nobody, packed a bag, and moved to France to open a brewery. His wife is French, the region was one they already loved from years of holidays there, and the plan had a certain romantic logic to it. Burnt-out Englishman finds redemption through hops. It even sounded good when he said it out loud.

Eight years is a long time to spend building something from nothing, and Rory will tell you, with the weary good humour of a man who has argued with French planning officials more times than he can count, that running a brewery teaches you a great deal about patience, plumbing, and the precise number of ways a business plan can go sideways before it finds its feet. It also, eventually, taught him that at fifty-five, having done all that, he still needed to earn a living. The pension, it turned out, had not read the business plan and was not going to stretch to cover it.

Back in the UK, the plan was simple enough: pick up where he had left off, and start recruiting for the charity sector again, the trade he knew best and had done for years before France. What he had not accounted for was how long it takes to build a client list back up from nothing, and how little a rebuilding business pays in its first few months. So, while he waited for the recruiting side to find its feet, he did something that had honestly never occurred to him before: he went out and did a bit of fundraising himself, mostly to keep the lights on.

The Side Job That Would Not Behave

The idea was that it would be temporary, a stopgap between clients, the sort of thing a sensible man in his fifties does quietly and stops doing the moment the recruiting business is properly back on its feet. This is not, in the end, quite what happened. Rory had spent years placing other people into this exact work without ever once trying it himself, a bit like a football agent who has never kicked a ball, and it turned out he rather liked it. He kept doing it. He is still doing it now, alongside the recruiting, which was not the plan at all.

It helped that it was nothing like he remembered from the outside. It was outdoors, sociable, done entirely on his own terms, a few days a week at farmers' markets, country shows and garden centres rather than five days behind a desk, and, usefully, nobody was his boss. The hours suited a man with no further interest in early alarms. And the money, on a good day, was proper money, not the vague promise he had spent a career persuading other people to believe in.

He is faintly embarrassed, as a man who built a career finding other people to do this sort of work, by how much he now enjoys doing it himself. But there it is: the conversations, brief as they often are, still give him a kick. He did not expect, at this point in his life, to feel quite so pleased with himself over a good chat at a market stall, let alone to still be recruiting other people into the very career he was supposed to have quietly walked away from.

Why Now, of All Times

Finding people his age willing to do this sort of work has always been the hard part, a fact Rory knows rather well, given that finding people to do it is technically still his day job. Most people who might suit it were busy being settled somewhere else, or simply had never thought to stand outdoors talking to strangers for a living. That, it turns out, is changing fast. People over fifty now make up nearly half the UK's self-employed workforce, driven by exactly the sums Rory found himself doing on his return. Charities, meanwhile, have long known that fundraisers closer in age to their donors tend to build steadier, longer-lasting support. What had been missing, oddly enough, was someone willing to actually go and do it himself, rather than simply recruiting from the sidelines.

What It Actually Takes

No experience is required, which is fortunate, since Rory himself had none when he started, despite years of recruiting people who did. What helps is a willingness to talk to strangers, a genuine fondness for the cause in question, and a reasonably good-humoured attitude to standing outdoors in weather that has not read the forecast. It will not suit everyone, and he is the first to say so. But for anyone arriving at fifty, or sixty, or hovering somewhere in that stretch between one career finishing and retirement not quite starting, it is worth knowing that this odd, unglamorous, faintly old-fashioned trade is still going, and there may well be room in it for you too, whatever else you happen to be doing at the same time.