How our awards can transform YOUR life

By the trailblazing mumpreneurs who’ve reaped the rewards

HEALTHY pies, posh pet food and gorgeous leather bags — all made in the UK and by mums who have set up multi- million- pound businesses from scratch.

Meet the mumpreneurs who will inspire you to enter the Daily Mail’s Aphrodite Award, part of the acclaimed NatWest everywoman Awards for businesswomen, now in their 15th year.

Women make great entrepreneurs — in 2015 they contributed £3.5 billion to the UK economy and employed 77,000 people — but still roughly half as many women as men strike out in business alone. It’s a statistic we aim to change . . . so do your bit by entering our awards!

THE AMBASSADOR I colour Camilla’s hair but my award is what the bank loves

AT ONE point, months after opening her own hair salon in Mayfair, celebrity hair colourist Jo hansford seriously considered buying a dozen blow-up dolls ‘ to stick in chairs at the back so the place looked a bit full’.

It was 1993. ‘ Our lowest point came one Saturday when we didn’t have a single booking. We pretended we had a plumbing problem and closed early.

‘A salon is like a restaurant — you can have amazing food but if there’s no atmosphere, people won’t come. And here we were, rattling around in a 2,000 sq ft salon. I knew what we were doing was good but we had to tell people about it.’

yet Jo was known and respected in the trade. At the age of 20 she had worked for Vidal Sassoon at the heart of Swinging London, and counted Richard Burton and Christine Keeler among her customers. One of her most loyal clients was — and still is — the Duchess of Cornwall.

But 25 years ago, no one knew she had struck out on her own. ‘We just couldn’t afford a budget for PR,’ she says. ‘Which is one of the reasons my husband, who always had a brilliant business mind, suggested I enter awards.’

Appearing on shortlists, and better still, winning awards ‘ pushes you to another level in terms of recognition’, she says.

A NATWEST everywoman finalist in 2005, Jo has since won her fair share of gongs — and made sure she told the bank manager about them every time.

‘When you go to the bank manager and he says: “What kind of business have you got?” and you say: “hair colouring”, it does help to have something to show how serious you are. Awards impress them.’

Now managed by her 42- year- old daughter Joanna, the business today has a range of branded haircare products and plans to expand into Dubai. When Jo first opened the salon, her children — Joanna and older brother Daniel — were teenagers taking time out to travel.

‘Actually, them being away was useful because I was working all the hours God sent — first one in, last one out every day,’ she says.

Jo’s husband died in 2001 but she carries on working part-time. ‘ I’ve always been on the go non-stop,’ she says. ‘I find it’s the best way to keep sane.’

THE JUDGE It’s a golden ticket to the smartest club in town

The founder of posh pie company higgidy, Camilla Stephens, 46, won an everywoman Award in 2010, and was back as a judge in 2015. For her, NatWest and the Daily Mail’s series of prizes for female entrepreneurs represent a golden ticket to the smartest club in town.

‘Winning doesn’t change your business overnight, but it gives you access to this astonishing group of women,’ she says. ‘Often you find you’re struggling with the same things.’

Camilla’s mission on starting higgidy in 2003 was nothing less than to ‘reclaim the pie’.

‘Back then the pie and sausage roll aisle in the supermarket was neglected,’ she says. ‘It was bland and cellophane-wrapped.

‘I’d seen what Kettle Chips had done for crisps, Covent Garden for soup and Green & Black’s for chocolate. Why couldn’t I do the same for pies?’

A chef by training, today she packs buckwheat pastry with spinach, feta and toasted pine nuts; tops pesto chicken with a filo crown; and cooks a pork and red cabbage pie filling with cider, among other combinations.

Last year, the company sold more than five million pies, and had a £25 million turnover — but business really began to take off just as Camilla became pregnant with her first child, Kate, who was a year old in 2009 when higgidy first appeared on the Fast Track 100 list of the UK’s swiftest growing companies.

The next year, when the company was again on the list, Camilla was pregnant with Jack.

It was, she maintains counterintuitively, the perfect time to start a family. ‘All women have different ways of parenting but I felt comfortable having a nanny. I found it easier to power up the business when they were little.

‘I wasn’t necessarily there for their first steps or first words but I don’t feel as guilty about that as I do, say, answering emails on my phone when I’m with them now and they ask me not to.’

THE WINNER Celebs buy my bags but it’s peer support I value

JULIE DEANE began her leather bag business, the Cambridge Satchel Company, with just £600 and an online spreadsheet. A stay-at-home mum in 2008, but

a chartered accountant by profession, she sat down at her kitchen table one day to work out how best to raise £24,000 in school fees for her children Emily and Max, then eight and six.

‘ My daughter in particular wasn’t thriving at the local state school and wanted to switch. When it’s about the happiness of your children, it does tend to focus your mind.’

Using a points-based system, and dozens of graphs, she analysed ten different business ideas before deciding satchels were her best bet.

When the singer Sophie Ellis-Bextor bought one online, the bag was transformed from geeky to quirky must-have — singer Taylor Swift and actress Emma Stone are also fans — and in 2012, in a huge stroke of luck, Google featured Julie in an advert for Chrome. Business boomed.

Less well known is how Julie lost her confidence, and how she is getting it back.

‘In 2014 we took a £12.7 million investment from a private equity firm,’ she says, ‘but in my mind that meant I had to hire business experts to tell me what to do next.

‘I lost self-confidence. I thought, well, maybe I don’t know what to do now because I’ve never done it before, and I went out and found other people to lead the business instead.

‘But actually there’s no one who knows The Cambridge Satchel Company as well as I do, and no one who will ever care about it as much.’

When profits began to fall under her new team, she took back control. Today she says the company is worth £50 million.

A NATWEST Award winner in 2012, Julie is also Entrepreneur in Residence at the British Library, where she sees how useful hubs of entrepreneurial activity can be.

‘The very worst thing that can happen to an entrepreneur is losing belief in themselves or their business. Not being isolated is very important, and so is knowing you’re valued by your peers.’

Julie didn’t work day and night to found The Cambridge Satchel Company, but fitted it neatly into school hours. ‘We didn’t have nannies because why would you give up the best bit? I wasn’t going to send the children to a better school at the expense of them losing time with their mother.

‘Nowadays, you’re supposed to get up at 5am to meditate before a full day at your desk. Well, I’ve got two children and dogs and chickens and a business to run. I’d much rather sleep in.’

THE FINALIST I wanted cards so my daughter felt special

JESSICA HUIE can pinpoint the moment she began to think like an entrepreneur. One lunchtime in 2006, scouring Oxford Street, in London, for a greetings card for her daughter Monet, then seven, she realised that among all the racks of little blonde princesses and blue- eyed boy superheroes, there wasn’t a single picture of a ‘black, Asian or even vaguely brown-skinned child at all’. Not one.

‘My daughter was going through a stage where she didn’t like her hair and kept saying she wished it was straight, not curly,’ she says. ‘So I decided to find her a card she could identify with, then write something inside about her being perfect the way she was.

‘But there was nothing out there at all, which felt wrong to me. Yet it also seemed like a huge commercial opportunity. I hadn’t planned on starting my own business, but from that moment I felt compelled to do it.

‘I was a single mum and very close to Monet; I felt sure there were other mums out there who would feel just the same.’

A PR executive, Jessica called in favours, enlisted the help of friends and began to create the kind of artwork she wanted, including an adorable photograph of a dark-skinned girl with a tiara wedged in her curly hair. Colorblind Cards was born.

‘I’d do it in my lunch hour or in the evenings. My warehouse was my living room. One night a group of girlfriends and I sorted 16,000 cards sitting on my sofa!’

Seven months later, the cards were stocked in more than 100 UK stores, and Jessica was doing deals with U.S. distributors, too.

Soon after, Jessica was a NatWest Everywoman finalist, which came ‘at a point when I was doubting my own ability’, she says. ‘I didn’t have a mentor or parents in business, so I was working it out as I went along. Getting through to the final was a huge boost, and it was great for my daughter, too.

‘Seeing that mum is the boss plants a seed early on.’

Now 37 and married with a fiveyear- old son, Jensen, and two stepchildren, Jessica was awarded an MBE in 2014 and is writing a memoir called Purpose, to be published next year.

THE SPONSOR I took along my bank manager to the awards

FOUR years ago, Suzanne Brock was a single mum in a semi who had just lost her job and was living on benefits.

Today, after a financial gamble that might easily have cost her the house, she is founder and director of an expanding pet food company, Nutriment, with a £4 million annual turnover .

‘There is definitely something to be said for blind optimism,’ she says, ‘but what really kept me going was fear — the knowledge that if it didn’t work, my children and I would lose the roof over our heads.’

After a career in the Army, Suzanne became a stay-at-home mum who did waitressing and bar jobs to supplement the family income. When her marriage broke down in 2008, leaving her with two children, then aged eight and six, she got a job with a pet food company.

She left in 2013 and, believing the bank would give her a business loan, decided to go it alone making dog food.

‘Except the bank wouldn’t give me a loan. They thought my business plan was too optimistic. So all of a sudden I had to remortgage the house and borrow from my mum to pay for the machinery, premises and staff I’d already hired.

‘I had to sell my car to pay staff. If I’d allowed myself to think of the worst-case scenario, I wouldn’t have survived. But actually there wasn’t much time to think.

‘For a year we lived on baked potatoes and had to live without treats or eating out. But the kids were amazing — they even helped with packing and labelling.’

Now, of course, 46- year- old Suzanne can afford a posh restaurant meal or two.

Sold online and through the delivery service Ocado, Nutriment is leading the trend for super-healthy raw pet food, containing not only meat from British farms but fresh vegetables and superfoods such as spirulina, bilberry and sea kelp.

The winner of a NatWest Everywoman Award in 2015, Suzanne has been ‘enormously inspired’ by the ‘mumpreneur’ network.

‘You don’t get many people saying “attagirl!” in this industry, and women are expected to be able to juggle ten things at a time anyway.

‘We are far less likely than men to say: “Hey, look how brilliantly I’m doing this.” So it’s lovely to have that recognition.’

Even better, she took her bank manager to the awards lunch at the Dorchester Hotel in London, where he very much ate his words.

‘We have a good relationship now. As it happens, I smashed that business plan out of the park.’