When I left school following A Levels decided not to go to University or College and basically fell into an insurance job working for Aviva in Manchester.

Work was OK at Aviva but didn’t really have a career and felt this was more of a job. Stayed there for 7 years until I got married and had a daughter. Unfortunately Aviva made it clear that I wouldn’t progress as now a working Mum. I started to look for a new job locally and came across Stanmore Insurance Brokers. Despite it taking me three attempts to secure the role, I finally got the job. I was delighted as the gentlemen I was to work for was so incredibly passionate about looking after clients. I never looked back and learnt all aspects of the role, moving quite quickly into an Account Executive role with my own bank of clients.

Later I moved to a management position and started to look after people, which became a new passion. Over 20 years ago, I had the opportunity to start insuring children’s nurseries through a new facility with Aviva. It was fantastic learning about a specific sector and this worked well with me as the majority of the owners were female when previously most of my clients were male. Bonds developed quickly and I soon learnt to understand there insurance and wider business needs. 18 years ago, I launch our own children’s nursery scheme dot2dot with a starting Gross Written Premium of £100,000. Now the Gross Written Premium is £4.2 m and has nurseries all over the UK. The scheme has been award winning and in fact we are shortlisted for an insurance award, so heading off to London tomorrow.

The next stage was to buy into Stanmore and in 2000 I became a Director and the following year, I remortgaged my house and bought 26% of the company. The following shares were purchased on 2015 and 2020 meaning I now own the whole company. The business now has a £1.7 million turnover and 24 staff.