The Next 20 Years
Declan Ferris, 64
Makes and sells hardwood kitchen furniture from a two-person workshop he opened at sixty-one
“Retirement was not a plan. It was the absence of one, and I had four decades to notice that and did not.”
Question 1
What did you think your life would look like at this age?
Finished. I worked in commercial insurance underwriting from twenty-three to sixty, which is a job I was good at and can describe honestly as forty years of being reliable. The picture I had of sixty-four was a caravan, some golf I did not really enjoy, and grandchildren at weekends. I had saved carefully for that picture. It took about nine weeks of living in it to understand I had bought a very well-funded version of doing nothing.
Question 2
What changed?
My wife went back to work. She had taken years out and returned at fifty-nine to a school office job she loved, and I watched her come home with things to say. I had nothing to say. I had been making furniture badly in the garage since I was thirty, one piece a year, and I sold a dresser to a neighbour for two hundred pounds and could not stop thinking about it for a fortnight. That is a small thing to build a decision on. It was still the only real signal I had.
Question 3
What are you building now?
A workshop in a converted dairy unit, me and one other maker, Ruth, who is twenty-nine and considerably better than I am at the joinery. We make kitchen furniture in oak and ash to order. Eleven to fourteen commissions a year, which is all two people can do properly. I do the client conversations, the measuring, the finishing, and every single quote, because pricing was what I got wrong for the first eighteen months and nearly closed us.
Question 4
What did you have to stop believing about yourself?
That being careful was the same as being competent. Underwriting rewarded me for forty years for not being wrong. Making things punishes that, because you cannot make anything without cutting an expensive piece of timber on a decision you are not certain about. I ruined about nine hundred pounds of oak in year one learning that hesitation costs more than error does.
Question 5
What is your next stride?
One conversation a week with someone who actually uses what we make. I have started going back to kitchens we fitted two years ago and asking what annoys them about it. Four visits in and I have already changed the drawer depth we default to, because three of the four said the same thing and nobody had ever told us.
The numbers
First commission at 61. 13 commissions last year. About £900 of timber ruined in year one. 4 follow-up visits so far, 1 change made to the standard drawer depth.