Interview with entrepreneur Joel Feldman Zack Fortag on leaving education early

BY PATRICK CROWDER

Joel Feldman founded his first business at 14. Now, at just 20 years old, he’s the Director of Harker’s Associates, which sells limited companies to solicitors, accountants, and entrepreneurs. We spoke to Feldman to find out how he was able to achieve success at such a young age, and what his plans are for the future.

“Harkers wasn’t fully founded until 2017, when I came on as a director. Previously, it was my father that had been forming limited companies to keep dormant as a hobby. In 2017 I finished school, and I had a job working at a place called Sykes House Farm, which was a butcher's,” Feldman says, “Obviously, it wasn't a path that I wanted to follow career-wise, it was just something that I needed to do to earn a bit of money. Very intense hours, three in the morning until three in the afternoon, in a cold factory. So doing that, I quickly realised that the nine to five, or in my case three to three, isn’t really what I want in life. I knew this from high school, but that really gave me the push forward. So I devised an idea that we should build this into a company, selling limited companies to entrepreneurs, accountants, and solicitors, as they would all benefit from having companies that are years old for credibility.”

Working long hours at the butcher’s gave Feldman time to envision a plan for Harker’s Associates, and the motivation to leave his job to do something different. But Feldman’s dreams of having his own business started long before he left school.

“When I was around 14 years old, I started my first business in advertising. I was a Google Ad specialist, and I sort of learned web development skills and such from doing that. I did it for a year and a half I think, and it didn't quite work out for me.There's a quote that my father always says, ‘everything comes back full circle’. I went to go work at the butcher’s, I realised that's not what I want to do, then we came on to Harker’s. I can say it comes back around full circle because I built the website through skills I'd learned through web development,” Feldman says, “So after we built the website, I ran a Google ads campaign, and we did all sorts of advertising and such.Then in 2020, around the time of the pandemic, we started taking on clients, mostly accountants and solicitors, and it really took off.That’s allowed us to expand a bit further, so now we reach a lot of entrepreneurs now that want to start a business.”

At 14 years old, Feldman had already become a skilled web developer with an entrepreneurial spirit. While other students were dreaming of attending university, he had already grown tired of school – he wanted to go into business immediately. And for Feldman, business runs in the family.

“My father has always been an entrepreneur, so was my grandfather, and my mother as well – basically all my family. I went to school, but in my last couple of years I just wasn't interested any more. I didn't feel like it was the right path for me.There’s that whole stigma of going from high school to college where you need to be in debt just to end up having a job you don't really like doing, and none of that ever clicked for me,” Feldman says, “I never enjoyed that sort of aspect of it, I always knew what I wanted to do. I knew I wanted to start a business, and my main goal was always to end up in property, so starting Harker’s and making a very large amount of money through that has allowed me to now go into property with buy-to-lets, developments and HMOs.”

Now, Feldman is getting into the property world as he’s always dreamed of. It seems as if he always has something going, be it Harker’s, property, or even a recent venture into Italian marble importation. He shared some advice for young people about education, and about bouncing back from failure.

“The main reason I wanted to do this interview is to get out the point that you don’t have to be living by this stigma in England where you have to go through the whole education system. If you want to be a doctor then of course it makes sense to do higher education, but if you’re someone who wants to start an e-commerce business, or any other sort of venture where you don’t need education, I don’t think you should be in a position where you feel trapped by that system,” Feldman says, “Like I say, we learn an awful lot through failure. I like to live by the expression ‘a winner is only a loser who didn’t give up’. Everyone’s had failure in their life, but the people who give up often stay as failures, and the people who fail but keep going after it end up as winners.”

Zack Fortag never connected with the traditional education system. He left school at 16 to find his own way in life through entrepreneurial spirit. Now, at 21, he is both a business and charity owner. I spoke with him to find out how he’s made it happen.

“I basically grew up in an entrepreneurial type of family and also an education type of family where some were teachers and some were business people. At around 13-14 years old I started to really dislike school,” Fortag says, “I was always very naughty at school, and I never really got on well with traditional education, so I basically decided to start two different businesses at school.”

One of these businesses was the fairly classic game of selling candy to other students, but the other was much more innovative.The video game FIFA’s online currency, which can be used to buy items in-game, would often fluctuate in price. Fortag saw this opportunity and began selling FIFA coins to other students much in the same way that a stock is traded – buy low, sell high. Fortag says that it wasn’t until he began reading Alan Sugar that he began to branch out into different business ventures which eventually led to the creation of Ahead of Time Academy.

“I did that until about 15 then started reading Alan Sugar’s book, and it basically told me about wholesale goods. I spent 500 pounds on a load of wholesale goods, things from your portable phone chargers, toilet roll, all sorts of different things. I’d wake up at four or 5am doing boot sales all day, and selling door to door at all the big houses. We’d say ‘this is for a school project’ when obviously it wasn’t, which I know is quite bad, but it was just a sales tactic,” Fortag says, “Once I had sold that out, I wanted to help different groups of young people in the education system, so I created a clothing brand called Ahead of Time Academy. We helped over 100 young people get into fashion-based opportunities, and I was the youngest designer to work with ASOS and Pure London Fashion Show.”

Ahead of Time was a way for young people to help develop and sell their business and fashion ideas.Through partnerships with clothing and accessory companies, people whose ideas were not getting seen could be elevated to the big leagues at a young age. It ran for about two and a half years before Fortag had his next big idea; Cozmos hospitality.

“When I was about 17 I wanted to move into the sport space, because I love sport, so I ran a hospitality company, which I still am involved in now. We work with agents all across the world providing sport and travel packages. Now we’ve got over 25 employees and over 500 agents working for us throughout the UK in America,” Fortag says.

During Covid, Ahead of Time Academy led webinars teaching education materials not taught in school, such as entrepreneurship, mental health pathways, and employability. Now Fortag has started a new charity called the Inside Out Clothing Project, which is the UK’s first clothing brand run by ex-offenders. Fortag explains how Alan Sugar led to the connections necessary to make it happen.

“While I was running Ahead of Time I got promoted by Alan Sugar, and through that I got interviews with Forbes, the BBC, and the Guardian. When I got interviewed by BBC, I met a reporter called Greg McKenzie. He was in care growing up, and we discussed ideas, and that’s how we created Inside Out,” Fortag says, “The idea was to get the most vulnerable groups of young people to launch their own businesses. It had never been done before in the UK.”

Now that Inside Out’s eight-week run has come to a close, I asked Fortag about his plans for the future. He answers with quiet, casual confidence.

“Next we’re hopefully going to be moving into another business soon – we’ve just reached 500 agents worldwide working for us which is obviously a massive achievement, probably one of the biggest deals in UK hospitality this year. On the charity side, we’ll just keep progressing. I’ve got some interesting projects coming up.”

Interview by Patrick Crowder.