Twincredible!
Kate built a business while juggling FOUR children under eight — including year-old twins. But as we crown her our Mumpreneur of the Year, she lets slip she’s expecting AGAIN — and it’s TWINS
A girl must marry for love, and keep on marrying until she finds it ZSA ZSA GABOR
Kate Ball has coped with two shocks in the past few weeks. the first was winning the NatWest everywoman aphrodite award — otherwise known as the Daily Mail’s Mumpreneur award — for Mini First aid, her brilliant business that teaches people of all ages across Britain to save lives.
‘I didn’t dare hope I’d win,’ said 38-year-old Kate, who has four children under the age of eight, including oneyear-old twins — pictured right.
the second shock was that she was pregnant again — with twins!
this makes entrepreneur Kate not only incredibly brave, but also very rare. according to the Royal College of Midwives, the odds on having two consecutive sets of twins is 700,000-to-one.
‘Yes, it’s twins — it wasn’t planned and it was a big surprise, but of course we’re delighted,’ she says.
‘this time, we feel a little bit more cautious because we don’t know what other people’s reactions will be. I mean, six children!
‘But we’ve always wanted a big family and we’re thrilled. What we really need now is a stylish four-seater push-chair. Or a minibus.’
But how on earth will she do it? If raising an average- sized family while running your own business takes a special kind of dedication — and every one of our nominees for this year’s Mumpreneur award (which goes to a woman who founded her business while raising a child or children aged 12 or under) has their own tale of single-minded commitment to both enterprise and offspring — how much greater the challenge with six?
let’s be clear: by the time the new twins are born next June, Kate’s family will consist of seven-year-old alfie, five-yearold Grace, two toddling 18-month-olds, emily and Olivia, and two newborns. the mind boggles. ‘at the moment, we have a nanny who works three days a week, but
we’re going to need someone full-time now,’ says Kate brightly.
‘the team at the head office will step up, and so will my husband Matt. We’ve done twin babies before and we know what to expect — though of course the challenge is bigger this time around.
‘I suppose I’m most apprehensive about how I’ll cope physically, but we’ll play that one by ear.’
Despite being their own boss — or possibly because of it — few of the mumpreneur nominees the Mail has encountered over three years of being sponsors of the Aphrodite Award, have ever given themselves much, if any, maternity leave.
Kate was no exception when she had her twin daughters this time last year, and anticipates little time off when the new babies are born.
‘I had this cushion that the girls could lie on to feed,’ she laughs, ‘and then my laptop would fit in the middle, so I could work even while feeding them.
‘I’d be doing emails in the middle of the night. I was still feeding them when we ran our annual training conference for franchisees this year, so they just came along with me.’ BUt
of course women shouldn’t assume such extreme juggling is the norm, and Kate, who lives with her family in Leeds, admits she risked exhaustion, verging on burn-out.
‘Hand on heart, I did neglect my own physical and mental health in those first few months,’ she says. ‘It gets to the point that you realise you haven’t stood under the shower for more than 30 seconds in weeks.
‘You keep thinking, “Oh I’ll sort myself out later, there’ll be time for me later” — but you keep putting it off and all the time the pressure just piles on.’
By the time emily and Olivia were six months old, Kate was able to ‘take myself in hand’, she says, but today she does look back and wonder how on earth she got through that time.
‘I imagine it will be just the same this summer,’ she says. ‘But we’ll cope.’
not that Kate has ever been the sort of woman to ‘ stay at home and wear an apron’.
‘I don’t want to judge women who do that, but it wasn’t me.’
Before founding Mini First Aid, she worked as a senior training manager for a big confectionery firm, and was often travelling.
But when Alfie was born, the logistics became a constant headache. It’s still women, she says, who bear the lion’s share of the organisational load when chidren arrive.
‘I was often travelling from Leeds to London for meetings, and quite often on a Friday evening, all the men around the table would pack up their things and say breezily, right, let’s reconvene at 9am on Monday.
‘And I’d be frantically thinking, OK, I’ll have to get up at 4am to catch my flight, and how are we going to juggle Alfie, who was then under one …?’ Grace followed 18 months later and, like all working parents, she and Matt played tag when the children were poorly.
‘the childminder would phone asking one of us to pick them up because they were ill with colds, and we’d get into those horrible debates. Which one of us should leave work in the middle of the day? Whose job is more important?’
something had to give — and in the end it was Kate’s place on the corporate career ladder.
But it wasn’t a defeat. Determined to set up her own business, on her own terms, she set-