At 60 years old, Daryl Chapman is enjoying a second lease of life. In fact, it’s more like a third.

While plenty of workers his age are planning retirement, Daryl is thinking the opposite. And it’s purely because he has the bit between his teeth: the drive to succeed coupled with the fact he believes too many employees in his age-bracket are cast on the scrapheap when they still have plenty to give.

“Experience is written off these days and it breaks my heart,” he says. “So many people are overlooked when they have a huge amount to give. What a waste of talent.”

Daryl Chapman

Daryl’s first lease of life came aged 40 when, with two children under five, he discovered a tumour in his neck.

“I’d done a variety of jobs since leaving school, from deputy supermarket manager in a branch of International Stores through to selling insurance,” he explains.

“In removing the tumour the surgeons cut from the top of my ear all the way down to underneath my jaw, literally stapling me back together. I needed to be in hospital for two weeks and while I waited for the results I read an article in a US magazine which was about asking people on their deathbed what their biggest regrets were. What came out top above everything else was doing a job they hated all their life. I thought ‘wow, that’s me’. I wasn’t motivated in my job and the piece really made me think.

“I ended up going back into hospital the day after being sent home as the left side of my face had swollen to the size of a football and the doctors said I might not wake up from the follow up operation. Well, that was it – if I woke up there was no way I was going back to job I hated.”

After talking things through with his wife, Ann, he trained to be a massage therapist.

“I was always pretty good at massage so I trained for two years and started to contact local gyms to pick up business,” he recounts. “I ended up talking to someone who ran a women’s-only gym called Curves which was an American franchise. It just sounded like a brilliant idea so six months later having done my training in Waco, Texas, I found a unit five miles from our house. Another six months later I bought my second gym off the woman who’d introduced me to the franchise. Then I bought another one, so I had three within a five-mile radius.”

Daryl put his heart and soul into the operation for 16 years.

“I sold one gym, closed another when the lease ran out and still had one other. But at that time my daughter Hannah was deciding what career path to follow for herself. She’d been working in marketing after leaving university and wasn’t particularly happy. I told her to try working for herself and to go away and come up with an idea.

“Well, the following day, she told me she was going to make candles. I told her she’d never make a living selling sticks of lavender but she introduced me to the world of dupe scents and said there was a real market opportunity.”

Although sceptical, Daryl cleared some room at home, made sure she didn’t worry about the bills and gave her one piece of clear advice – nothing ventured, nothing gained.

“I wanted her to have a go at something without too much financial pressure but I also made it clear that at some stage in the near future she’d need to start contributing, and that if it didn’t work she’d need to look at something else.

“Two weeks in and it was going nowhere and I remember ringing my wife from the gym saying ‘tell Hannah she needs to find a proper job’. Yet the next day she made some good contacts and at the end of the week had sold £200-worth of stock. Again I rang her mum but this time I said ‘tell her to ignore my last message!’.

“By week three I could see it was going to turn into something and I said we should do it together – her youth and social media skills combined with my age and experience. I looked after the finances and paperwork and she concentrated on the product and outreach.”

Daryl admitted Googling ‘how to make a candle’ and while proud that he made the first one is also humble enough to admit that, to this day, it is the only one he’s made.

Sales grew, and he was soon clogging up the Post Office queue at 4.45pm each evening with 50 parcels and a line of unhappy customers behind.

“I was so embarrassed that I used to give the Post Office staff free wax melts!” he smiles.

By week six Daryl remembers not being able to move in the house for the boxes and boxes of product.

“The cooker was constantly being used for melting. Every work surface had something drying on it. There was paperwork over the settees and floors and I just said ‘enough is enough’. We needed premises and we needed them fast.”

That was on a Saturday and by the following Tuesday, they’d found a 1,300sq ft commercial unit in Andover, and the following Friday they moved in.

“It was such a learning curve, so much so that on the first Monday we realised we didn’t have a cooker to melt the wax with. Luckily five doors down was a white goods company!”

A year on and it was clear that Daryl’s last gym would need to go too.

“I ended up working one day at the gym and five for Ava May, so I sold my last gym in June 2019. By this time Ava May had eight members of staff and things were really ramping up.

“Before all this came along I was thinking about carrying on with the gyms until my mid-60s and then winding down but now it’s the opposite – now I can’t see myself ever retiring from this!”