With hopes for an enterprise-led recovery resting on businesspeople of all ages and backgrounds, Anna Blackaby meets two Birmingham entrepreneurs who believe you are never too young or old to start your own venture.

Since starting his first business at the age of 17, serial entrepreneur Barnaby Lashbrooke has always run his own company – and his latest venture aims to help others do the same.

When a Time Etc client needed rocket fuel in a hurry, he didn’t panic – he rang the Jewellery Quarter-based firm who immediately scoured suppliers throughout the north of England on his behalf.

And so before the end of the school physics workshop the client was presenting, a taxi bearing the fuel arrived and hoards of excited children got their chance to watch the rocket launch.

Another client had fallen madly in love and planned to jet off abroad on the spur of the moment to get married – but there was just the pressing matter of a tender to hand in the day before the ceremony.

Time Etc took care of it, the client got married and his educational business won its biggest tender yet.

Seated on the ground floor of his four-storey office space in the Jewellery Quarter, the Time Etc founder explained that most of the outsourcing firm’s work is slightly more mundane – chasing invoices, taking phone calls, dealing with emails – although he admits to being surprised at the variety of business needs Time Etc is asked to help with.

The 185 entrepreneurs who have enlisted the 30-strong virtual assistant firm cover a variety of sectors and are based all over the UK – and in some cases as far afield as Australia and Dubai.

Given his background, Mr Lashbrooke, now 28, is no stranger to the pressure on entrepreneurs trying to build their fledgling companies.

He launched Time Etc in 2006, after becoming a millionaire when he sold the internet hosting company he founded at the age of 17.

Starting a company at an age when most people are more concerned with whether they will be served in the pub was not without its challenges.

“When I started out I had to do a lot of pretending that I was a bit older,” said Mr Lashbrooke.

“I had to be very careful about saying how old I was and let people believe I was a bit older because people used to react quite oddly.”

But the drawbacks of being a teen entrepreneur were far outweighed by the benefits of youth – namely a fearlessness when it came to new technology and unlimited energy to dedicate to building up the business.

“I think I probably adopted technology, hosting and the internet more naturally because I had grown up with it,” he said.

“Had I been a bit older it would have been a bit harder as I would have been more intimidated by it,” he said.

“Also the energy I had when I was 17 and 18 was huge. I was able to work a 20 hour day, go to sleep for two or three hours, get up and go to college, then work until six the next morning, sleep and then go to college again.

“I don’t think I could do that now.”

It was his direct experience of the challenges of running his own startup that led him to set up Time Etc after selling his internet venture.

“It was a passion for supporting entrepreneurs and making them feel less isolated,” he said.

“When you start out there’s no-one there to help and it’s expensive to recruit someone and pay a couple of thousand pounds a month.

“When I was running my first business, my first employee took more time than they saved – it was a necessary evil to go through,” he said.

“We’re saying we can help you avoid that.”

But it hasn’t all been plain sailing – one of the biggest hurdles is communicating the concept of Time Etc to potential clients.

It took us a while to get started because it’s a really fresh new industry,” he said.

“Although part-time PAs have existed for a long time, the notion of outsourcing over the internet and sending tasks that only you know how to do to someone you have never met took a while to persuade people,” he said.

Mr Lashbrooke believes that nowadays, more than a decade on from the launch of his first business, it’s easier for teenage entrepreneurs to be taken seriously.

“Maybe it has something to do with the fact that there are a lot of high-profile young entrepreneurs at the moment and programmes like Dragons Den have raised the profile of young people starting business,” he said.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the scale, Professor Michael Brown believes he is at the perfect age to pursue a new business.

Prof Brown never thinks about his age – even though his 80th birthday is coming up later this year.

As the oldest member of Birmingham Science Park’s tech startup incubation scheme Entrepreneurs for the Future (e4f), his company Clothopharma sits alongside firms made up of 20-something internet geeks developing social media games and iPhone apps.

After a distinguished academic career in microbiology, which saw him work in prestigious institutions in Europe and the US, he arrived at Aston University, where he was head of the pharmacy department.