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Victoria Tomlinson is 70 and counts herself six or seven careers in, with plans still outstanding. Her working life started in legal and contract work on aircraft engine contracts, took in selling banknotes around the world, then PR at EY, then culture change in EY's London office, then her own comms business, then social media, and now Next-Up. The idea that someone at 70 is at the end of something is, as she puts it, living a life that has expired.
Who is on this episode
Victoria Tomlinson is the founder and CEO of Next-Up, which helps organisations unlock the value of experienced talent and helps senior professionals work out what comes after the big job. She is a former EY leader, an award winning communications entrepreneur, an international speaker and a BBC commentator. Her book Expiry Date Never, subtitled Age Is the New Superpower, is co-authored with Louise, who is 56 and runs an AI advisory business, and who wrote four chapters on the specific advantage of experience.
What they covered
Victoria's numbers do most of the arguing. 91% of over 50s want to progress in their careers. 70% of businesses started by people over 50 last more than three years, against 28% of those started by younger generations. The older cohort is half as likely to take sick days, and on productivity the research shows essentially no difference between age groups. Her instruction to anyone running a team is therefore the opposite of the usual kindness: expect more, not less, and do not let people wind down in their own heads.
The harder half of the conversation is about identity. Her clients are partners in professional firms, and she has watched people go from running something on Friday to nobody needing them on Monday, some of them into clinical depression. She uses the language of bereavement for it deliberately. Retirement worked as a design when it lasted about two years. It does not work across twenty, thirty or forty.
"You could be retired for longer than you've worked."
Victoria Tomlinson
Imran shares his own smaller version of this, going from a company of 150 to 250 people to complete silence after the Instapage exit, and discovering how much of his self worth had been attached to the title. Victoria's practical answer is a long runway: the firms doing this well start the conversation five or six years out, because working out what you want next takes years and a great many coffees, including asking people who know you what they think you are actually good at.
She closes on AI, and makes the case most useful to an operator. She had a bad week with a model while writing the book: she asked it for case studies from South America and Africa, could not verify one of them, and was told it had been invented. Her point is not that the tools are useless. It is that the person who can look at an output and say "where did you get this from" is now the scarce resource.
"You have never needed people with experience more to look at, question things, you know, why are we doing this? Where's it going? What are we trying to achieve here?"
Victoria Tomlinson
Key insights
- Do not design for winding down. 91% of over 50s want to progress, and 98% of the senior professionals Victoria works with expect to keep going in some form. What they lack is a picture of what that looks like.
- Founder durability runs the other way to the stereotype: 70% of businesses started by people over 50 last beyond three years, against 28% for younger founders.
- Start the transition five or six years early. Firms that leave it to the final year hand their partners a cliff, and the non executive director route that 86% of them want is now far more competitive than they assume.
- Make learning something new each year an explicit decision rather than something you hope happened. Victoria's point is that you can get genuinely expert in a couple of months now, so the constraint is intent.
- Use AI to read where your market is going, not to write your CV. The judgement to challenge an output is the part experience supplies, and hallucinated citations in professional work are the proof.
Watch the full conversation on YouTube, or listen to the audio version on Apple Podcasts.
