Tenacious two had to fight hard for company’s success

WHEN Lucy Cohen and Sophie Hughes took their business plan to a bank when they were starting out they were not only refused a loan, the bank also would not give them an account.

A business adviser told them straight out he did not think their business would work.

Why were they turned down? Was it because they were both 23 years old? Or was it their gender? Or both?

Thankfully the tenacious two carried on and over the past 15 years have built their pioneering business.

Mazuma was the brainchild of Lucy Cohen.

Lucy comes from a very creative family – “My massive rebellion was getting a proper job” – and it was seeing the stress at tax time that helped her come with the idea for a new business.

“Coming from a creative family and seeing the trauma really involved in the annual schlep to the accountant’s office with a pile of receipts, the fear of the bill and January always being this like really stressful thing,” Lucy explains.

“And I put that together with what we had been learning [at the Financial Training Centre in Cardiff] and I was like, why is there not a better way of doing this?”

Lucy and Sophie had been at school together, Howell’s School in Llandaff, but Lucy went to a different sixth form and they lost touch. It was at the Financial Training Centre in Cardiff they reconnected and it was here that Lucy shared her idea with Sophie.

The business was to be a low cost, subscription-based accountancy services, where people would send their information every month in a purple envelope.

The decision on the name Mazuma, an old Yiddish word for money, was a deliberate choice to allow the company to grow as a brand and away from them as individuals.

“We always had the idea of growth of brand, right from when we were 23,” Lucy said.

This was 2006. There was no cloud accounting software.

“You had desktop software that was clunky, took a lot of time and was not really accessible pricewise for micro businesses, small businesses, sole traders, basically the businesses that make up 98% of the business in the UK, this stuff wasn’t really accessible for them,” Lucy explains.

“We came up with idea putting it in an envelope every month, replacing the idea of the shoe box under the bed. They can put it in an envelope and send it in to us. We’ll do the bookkeeping, manage accounts, tax advice, they just pay a subscription.

“We were the first to market with a subscription model for accountancy in the UK. Others have followed but we are still the only ones who have a true subscription model.

“We started working on our old, crappy laptops that were really slow. We had one printer that we had to share, swapping the wire when one of us wanted to print, an old filing cabinet in my spare bedroom and about £100 between us.”

It was then they got their first knock.

“The first business adviser we ever saw, told us that it would never work, and that we couldn’t do it,” Lucy said.

“And then we just decided that he was wrong, with all the confidence of a 23-yearold. We knew the industry was ready.”

For two women in their early twenties it was tough.

And an eye-opener.

“We definitely got asked several times if we worked for our dad’s company,” recalls Sophie.

“It was at the first networking networking event we went to, and we were like, ‘Oh, that’s happening, that’s a thing.”

The pair believe that their formative years at Howells had helped them, that they always been around places of empowerment. But they did feel up against it, especially in an industry heavily male-dominated. And as the company has developed and they have moved more into the tech side of the business they have entered another sector that has a gender imbalance.

“In these industries, you