Before starting Open House, I had spent around 40 years working in retail, including more than 20 years in management. Work had always given my life a very clear structure. When that career came to an unexpected end, that structure disappeared very quickly. After spending my entire working life knowing what my role was and what was expected of me, I suddenly found myself without that routine and having to work out what came next.
It was a strange adjustment. I was 55, with decades of experience behind me, but I was also questioning whether I really wanted to go back into another retail management job and simply continue doing what I had always done. There was uncertainty, but there was also the possibility of doing something completely different.
I spent a lot of time developing an idea initially called Thrive, which later became Guiding Light. It was based around helping people build confidence, clarity and emotional intelligence, drawing partly on the experience and people skills I had developed throughout my career. At the same time, there was another path pulling me in a completely different direction.
Music, DJing and entertaining had always been a huge part of my life, and I was beginning to explore whether I could turn that into a business too. So when I reached the point of starting Rebel Business School, I hadn’t arrived with one finished business waiting to be launched. I had two very different ideas and was still working out where my future really lay.
When I registered for Rebel, I knew I wanted to create something of my own, but I was still working out exactly what that would be. What I lacked wasn’t ideas or enthusiasm. It was experience of actually starting and running a business. I wanted to understand how you take an idea and turn it into something people will actually pay for, without needing huge amounts of money or having everything worked out from day one. Rebel appeared at exactly the right time. I saw it as an opportunity to learn more about how small businesses really get started and to help me work out how I could turn one of those ideas into a genuine new direction for myself.
Launching Open House has given me a completely different kind of working life. Retail had become mentally and physically draining, and over time I had stopped getting the same sense of purpose from the role. I was working hard, but I no longer felt particularly connected to what I was doing.
Now I am building something around things I am genuinely passionate about: music, entertaining, creating events and bringing people together. Because of that, it rarely feels like work in the way my previous career did. I also have much more freedom to develop my own ideas, approach venues, create different kinds of events and see those ideas become real.
It has also given me back a real sense of purpose and momentum. I am meeting new people, building relationships with venues and clients, learning new skills and gradually establishing a reputation for what Open House does. The business is still developing, but I am now earning money from something that started as an idea, and each successful event gives me more confidence that I can build something sustainable around the things I genuinely enjoy doing. Most importantly, I feel that I am moving forward again, but this time on a path that I have chosen for myself.
One of my biggest learnings from Rebel was that waiting for everything to be perfect can become an excuse for never actually starting. A typical example was the idea of saying, “My business isn’t ready to launch yet.” Rather than accepting that, the question became: why not? It was also reassuring to discover that so many other people on the course had the same questions, concerns and insecurities that I did. It normalised a lot of the uncertainty around starting a business and made the whole idea feel much less intimidating.
The two ideas I have carried with me most are: don’t wait for perfect, and build something around something you are genuinely passionate about. If you care about what you are doing, it is much easier to keep the enthusiasm needed to keep pushing it forward.
