As a teenager I was very much a Zeitgeist kid. I was going on Ready Steady Go every week as a dancer and I was down the King's Road buying all the latest fashions. I've always had this ability to spot the trends before they happen. It's intuitive. And, as my interests have grown, I've still been plugged into what's coming next.
After I left school I started temping and by chance I went to work for a very big advertising agency and they put me in the PR department. It was the first time I'd even heard of PR and I loved it. It was all about people and creativity and promotional ideas. It was then I realised it was a man's world. Most of the people there were men who spent most of their time wining and dining mates of theirs and coming back to the office completely drunk. Then you had all the women underneath them who were sending out press releases and doing all the hard work.
I went to work temporarily in a fashion PR company. I met Katharine Hamnett and she said, "Do my PR and I'll pay you £20 a month." I was living in a flat in Notting Hill with my boyfriend of the time and I literally started from the kitchen table. Within about a month I had four fashion accounts, including Katharine.
I had no idea what I was doing. I'd just fill my car up with lots of samples from my clients and go round all the magazines and newspapers. The secret was partly that I knew what was happening and I could talk about it with authority and also the fact that I was really passionate about it.
After a period of time I started a little office in Covent Garden. As I got more clients, I would put the money back into the business. One thing I learnt from my parents is to invest back in your own business.
Like a lot of women of my pioneering generation, I really thought that I could do it all. We thought we could have our babies and carry on working and somehow it would all fit in. A lot of my work was socialising, so I'd be out late most nights, and my life was completely out of balance, to the point where I started looking for alternative answers and wandered into Buddhism. I would do formal, ritual chanting twice a day. That gave me the grounding I needed and I did it for 11 years.
By the late 80s we'd moved our offices to West London. I had 50 people working for me and we were behind just about anything exciting happening in London. My husband and I had an enormous house on the canal in Maida Vale, and it really was the Ab Fab lifestyle, with a chauffeur, a live-in cook and a nanny. To the outside world I was a huge success, but inside I was just burning out. My marriage finished. We had stopped talking to each other. We were just too busy talking about work all the time. And I didn't see a lot of my kids. I was travelling a lot. It was really hard to keep the momentum going. It was all about noise and I just thought, now I need to have silence.
In 1992 I left the business, got divorced, sold the big house and went on a journey of self-exploration. I started going to conferences all over the world about all the things I wanted to know more about. It was about finding out how the world works and where I fitted in. I wanted to see how I could use my skills and gifts in communications and actually discover who I was rather than being a brand.
I started writing books. The first one was The SEED Handbook: the Feminine Way to Create Business. I realised there was going to be this time when a lot of women would want to start a small business. They'd want to work from home, they'd want to feel in control of their lives, and the corporate world didn't reflect their values or who they were. So I wrote the book for them. When it first came out ten years ago, people thought, what's she going on about? Of course now it's very clear that women do have different communication skills, our brains are wired differently, we have different desires and aspirations.
I get distracted and end up doing stupid things like going on reality TV shows. Although I'm actually quite a serious businesswoman and I do a lot of very heavyweight stuff, at the same time I go out and do all this nutty stuff that I shouldn't touch with a bargepole. I need a PR! But on the positive side, having created a high profile for myself, it does give me the possibility of going on to television to talk about the things I really do care about.
Women have gone backwards since the 80s in many ways. But where we are really coming into our own is as business owners. You've got really high flyers like Cath Kidston, Michelle Mone, Natalie Massenet. And there are thousands of women running small businesses from their kitchen tables. I started a social networking site for women — there's a huge number out there following their dreams.
I think the next stage is having a space where women can work together and my big project at the moment is a women's business club in Covent Garden. It's the accumulation of the last ten years of work for me, and it's all about understanding that women not only want to work in a different way but they'd like a different environment to work in. Because so many women are working independently and virtually, they don't really have somewhere they can have meetings or go to in between meetings, all that sort of thing. And the clubs that we have are very male. Mine will be more like a home, but it will also be as up to date as any business centre.
I'm not anti-men, I just think we all need to get a balance of our male and female sides. That's how I believe we'll create a new kind of future. I feel positive that it will be by women finding themselves that things will change.
For more information visit seednetworkingforwomen.com
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