Love Is Not Enough: A Smart Woman’s Guide to Money. Merryn Webb Somerset
us secretly hope for a great deal more than that: we dream that one day we’ll be rich. Ideally, we’d like this to happen without us having to make much in the way of effort. That’s why every week 14 million of us buy tickets for the National Lottery. Sadly, playing the lottery is an absolutely hopeless way to get rich: every week about 13,999,999 of us don’t win a penny. So what’s a better way? A more realistic answer is to start your own business. One million women in the UK are self-employed and women now own a third of our small businesses. Following their lead isn’t easy and it certainly isn’t foolproof: a large percentage of small businesses fail in the first year and another large percentage struggle on for a few more years without ever making real money. But some will hit the big time.
Remember the story of the Body Shop? Thanks to having the right idea at the right time and working relentlessly to make her dream a reality Anita Roddick is now a millionaire many times over. The same is true of Julia Pankhurst, founder of Friends Reunited, a social networking website valued at many millions of pounds. And these extreme examples of success aside, there are thousands of other women around the country making good livings from their businesses.
One is my sister Tabitha. She has always found working for other people tricky and long had dreams of running her own company. So three years ago, at the age of 28, she started doing just that and launched her own accessories firm called Tabitha. She designed a collection of handbags, got them made up at a factory in east London and then spent the next few months schlepping from trade show to trade show selling them. Selling is one of the things she does best and within months she was deluged with orders. Today her bags are on the arms of many a celebrity (Danni Minogue is a big fan!), she manufactures her products in China and Brazil and her turnover in 2005 was nearly £750,000. She’s done extremely well and done it very quickly but, as she says, it really hasn’t been easy and it still isn’t – she seems to hit a new business-related crisis of some kind every week. For the last two years she has worked every hour possible; she has barely seen her friends and family; she hasn’t had time to have a proper boyfriend; and she has had to cede custody of her cats to an old flame as she has no time to look after them. Starting and running a small business is, she says, the hardest thing she has ever done and no one who isn’t ‘truly passionate’ about their product or idea should even consider following in her footsteps.
Her words are echoed by Caroline Bennett. Twelve years ago, Caroline, now 40, raised £90,000 and opened a sushi bar called Moshi Moshi in Liverpool Street in London. Years of hard slog later she has two more restaurants. Moshi Moshi turns over nearly £3 million a year and produces profits of several hundred thousand pounds a year. Smaller scale, but getting there, is the firm launched in 2001 by Australian Ashe Peacock. Antipodium is dedicated to Australian fashion with a shop in Soho but Ashe also does PR for Australian brands in the UK and wholesales their products into other retail outlets here. She now has eight staff in London and turns over a few hundred thousand pounds a year.
So how can you have a go at following in their footsteps? I’ve asked Caroline, Tabitha and Ashe for their top tips and summarized them below.
1 Don’t start a business unless you really want to do it. If you don’t want it enough you won’t be able to cope with the long hours, the financial difficulties and the utter lack of time for anything not related to your work. It just isn’t enough to like handbags to start a handbag business and liking sushi isn’t enough to give you the drive to launch a restaurant chain.
2 Research, research, research. Your idea may sound good to you but is there really a gap in the market? Make a proper business plan showing exactly how you imagine your project will develop. How big is the market? Who are the competitors? How big can you grow? What are the potential weaknesses? What are the costs likely to be? ‘I didn’t do a proper business plan,’ says Tabitha. ‘I thought I’d just figure it out as I went along. Big mistake. Without set targets and proper pre-planning the business was a huge mess by the end of the first year.’ NatWest has a free online advice programme to teach entrepreneurs about planning and conducting market research. See www.natwest.com/newbusiness.
3 Get all the advice you can. If you go it alone you have a 40% chance of succeeding but if you join a mentoring scheme of some kind those odds improve to 50%. But never forget it’s your business. Everyone has an opinion and likes to offer advice, says Tabitha. ‘Listen but stay focused on what you want and go with your gut instinct.’ You’re the one who will end up dealing with the consequences of your actions so all the final decisions have to be yours.
4 ‘Take full responsibility for everything,’ says Ashe. If you start a fashion business ‘you don’t just get to play around with dresses’. You have to understand all the boring bits too. If you don’t do your own book-keeping you won’t make it. ‘I’ve learned the hard way that no one else will do things as carefully as you, so you have to be qualified to supervise everyone who works for you on every level.’
5 Understand that employees and friends are different things. However much you convince yourself that having friends working with you or for you will work, says Tabitha, ‘it just won’t – ever’. Managing staff isn’t something you think about when you first start up but if you have any success at all you won’t be working on your own for long. Then hire very carefully. Once hired, staff are hard to get rid of, ‘and in a small company politics can be so destructive’. ‘Business is about the people you employ,’ says Ashe and it is hugely challenging learning ‘how to be a leader while being fair and allowing people the freedom to make their jobs as interesting as they want them to be’. Remember too that you have to support them but they won’t support you: ‘The boss gets no support from anywhere: people assume you don’t need it.’
6 Be nice to your bank. An understanding bank manager will make all the difference when you have cash-flow problems. And you will have cash-flow problems, says Tabitha. Lots of businesses look great on paper but go bust anyway when they run out of the cash they need to deal with day-to-day expenses. Small fashion businesses collapse every day thanks to department stores not paying them for months after their wares have been sold, for example. See www.payontime.co.uk for advice on making the big boys pay you what they owe you.
7 Use the Internet. Web-based businesses can start smaller and use less capital than others. Eighty per cent of the businesses in the UK run by women have a website and it’s essential that you too have an online presence. A good website doesn’t come cheap, says Tabitha, but it is the most important part of your branding: get it right and it will be the best investment in yourself you ever make.
8 Remember size isn’t everything, says Caroline. If you have started the business looking for the status and recognition that come with having a well-known brand that’s one thing, but if it’s financial freedom you want you may find that you are better off expanding slowly, or if you are doing well being small just staying small. A small company offering a good regular income is better than a large one making losses.
9 Don’t get too hung up on looking for grants. There are around 3,000 different types of grant available to small businesses – from the government, the EU and various other support bodies (see www.businesslink.gov.uk) – but most small business owners say that the red tape and form filling take up so much time and energy that it simply isn’t worth bothering to apply for them.
10 Remember that you will have to take risks. Being an entrepreneur is uncomfortable and working hard alone won’t guarantee success. You’ll need creative thinking and luck too. ‘You can’t assume that the people you do business with will be honourable,’ says Ashe. ‘Anything that can go wrong will.’ ‘You are always the last to get paid,’ says Tabitha, ‘so if you need routine and security, don’t do it – entrepreneurship isn’t for you.’
11 Don’t let yourself be discriminated against. A recent study by Warwick University showed that women starting a business pay up to 1% more a year for their start-up loans than men. They also borrow much less: an average of £6,100 against £18,500 for men, says the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants. There are