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.
That arrangement suited DocComs, a London-based start-up developing an encrypted messaging platform for doctors. Co-founder Roseanna Jaggard, who runs the business with her husband Matt, had considered the various free online services on offer to founders, but found them generic. Sapient, by contrast, has been working with the team on an investment strategy tailored to the company’s clinical niche.
In its inaugural year, the foundation donated a four-figure sum to the Solidarity Teacher Training College, part of the Solidarity with South Sudan charity. Logan says other educational causes will follow.
The retirees are unapologetically picky about whom they help. Projects must genuinely interest them, and venture capital firms hoping to use the foundation as a back door to discounted consulting have been politely shown the door. Logan says one or two have “tried to pull a fast one”.
The recurring themes among Sapient’s clients are the trio that haunt almost every British SME: funding, technology and governance. Logan and his colleagues have used their address books to introduce founders to investors and capital sources they would never otherwise have reached.
One beneficiary is Oraczen, an agentic artificial intelligence company with offices in London and Texas. Co-founder Raghu Prasad credits Sapient with steering the business away from chasing broad AI opportunities and towards a more practical commercial wedge in contracts, procurement, supplier management and spend leakage. The intervention, Prasad says, helped the team “sharpen our focus very quickly” as they plan an expansion across the UK and Europe.
“In a traditional setting, advice of this depth and quality from senior telecom and enterprise experts would likely have cost us ten to twenty times more,” Prasad adds. “As an early-stage AI company building for enterprises across Europe and the UK, that level of access and strategic guidance would have been difficult to justify financially.”
The foundation operates under what Logan calls the “no heavy lifting” rule. Phillips, who spends a few hours a day on Sapient projects, still has time to tend his allotment, take guitar lessons and volunteer for Citizens Advice. The point, Logan insists, is that the work must remain enjoyable, the charities well funded and the queue of grateful founders steadily growing.
Britain’s SMEs have long complained about the cost and accessibility of senior strategic advice. It turns out the answer may have been sitting on the patio all along, quietly bored and reaching for the secateurs.
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The retired executives swapping the golf course for the boardroom – and charging next to nothing