Angela Brown

Name:

Angela Brown

Business:

Training in Childcare Ltd

Web site:

www.traininginchildcare.co.uk

Years in business:

9

Number of businesses:

3

Entrepreneurs' Forum member

I always thought that business was something that other people did. I’ve never had tonnes of confidence and I’ve never been officially trained in business. To say I was a businesswoman when I first started out made it seem like I knew something about business. That was a bit dishonest as I didn’t have a clue.

When I was younger, I thought all business people did was take advantage of people to make money. Sharks in suits really. I think that’s the public perception of entrepreneurs: just people who chase cash.

However, the most successful people I know have not been driven by money or the desire to be multimillionaires by the time they’re a certain age. Business people chase a variety of things, be it an idea or a dream they have, or just something they have a passion for and will drive them to reach a goal. If they’re true to what they believe in, they’re the ones who appear to me to be the most successful. I’m quite proud to call myself a businesswoman now.

My background is in social work and lecturing. I believe in enabling or changing things in cultures to do with education.

Colleges are businesses now though. A lot of lecturers were forced down a line where it was more about the number of people that you had in front of you, and getting them through. That really impacted on me. I wasn’t comfortable with this new business plan, and I didn’t like doing it.

But, I learnt to do it. I learned things like marketing and the importance of doing other things that were business like, but had little to do with education itself.

I was still very uncomfortable with the quality of what we were producing. I’d studied child protection and child psychiatry, and I knew that it was extremely important that children have a really excellent start. You need very well trained people to do that, but our skills were wasted to a certain extent.

In 1999 I’d taken a team of tutors to a grade 1. It was the first time we’d ever been inspected and a lot of work had gone into it.

My father got very ill at that time. It was the end of the academic year and I asked for some unpaid leave so I could spend some time with my dad. My sister and I were doing a lot of travelling so that we could support him.

I was told by someone in middle management that I could have three days for the funeral when he died and that was it.

I hadn’t even come to terms with the fact that he was going to die and yet I was being told that. That was a focus for me. I just thought, why am I doing this? I don’t believe in what I’m doing any more and I have no control over what I produce. I realised I wasn’t in control of anything in my life at all and wasn’t even appreciated when I felt like I did something well

In September that year I started up my own business with a partner. We gathered people who had done qualifications in childcare and match them up with people who needed it. It was in effect a nanny matching service which we called Inter Nannies.

It wasn’t so much, I’ve got an idea for a business, let’s sit down and do this, it was more a reaction to circumstance. I simply hated what I was doing. It was very scary as I had no confidence whatsoever, but it was just instinct. I can’t really describe it other than to say, there’s something here that is going to work, but I don’t really know how.

Inter Nannies ran for a year and a half until our partnership broke up amicably. It had worked well at the start; I liked doing the creative stuff like marketing which up until then I hadn’t realised was a business skill.

I think the reason why the partnership broke up was why a lot of partnerships break up: direction. I wanted to grow the business; she wanted to keep it small and just do what she did best. I didn’t have a problem with that, but I couldn’t see how it could sustain the two of us for much longer.

I also got a bit cross with some families. Some of them said, we don’t even pay our cleaner that much, we’re certainly not going to pay you that. I’m thinking, look at the training that these people have had, look at the value they can add. We were talking about their children and the impact that good childcare can have on their lives.

The business was definitely better than we’re I’d been, but it still wasn’t enough. It wasn’t exciting enough.

In order for Inter Nannies to make money, I’d gone and started to make training packages. I got into areas where I went up to people and said, you’ve got a problem with your continuous professional development or something, let me have a look at it.

Using that idea, I got out of the partnership and set up my new business, called Training in Childcare. We deliver original training packages to childcare workers, which meant I gained control over the quality of what I did. My self respect came back really because although I didn’t have much confidence in my business skills, or lack thereof, I did have the confidence to do something which I believed in.

It’s about living with yourself at the end of the day, being able to do something that you can make an impact on. Whatever comes out of my mouth is mine now; I don’t have to go through five other people for permission to say something. Also, if I think something’s wrong, it’s fabulous to be able to say, that’s not right.

What I wanted to change was massive; it was a better outcome for children. But if you’ve got something that you believe in, don’t change that core. I think if I tried to be too clever, thinking oh there’s money there, we can bring in more people to do this, I would have failed because I’m not enough of a business person to understand that.

But, because there was that ‘guiding light’ there, the quality of childcare, that steered me down the right path. I never had tonnes of confidence, but I’ve got a lot more since I started the business. I’m having the best time in the world now.

The trouble is, my business is a small business but it competes with big business: schools and colleges. I’ve got to be different and responsive. I’ve got to know where government policy’s going to go and design programmes that are flexible to the people that need them.

But I’ve got a great team around me. With lecturers, unless you give them the freedom to create and to be responsible as teachers and let them use their skills, then you get dissatisfied people.

My team come in and they solve problems. They’re not just dealing with a course that somebody else has written; they’re looking at how to solve a specific problem. It’s like education: it’s not about the best you can buy, it’s about letting people grow and realise their potential.

I get my support from my family: my husband and my two girls. My husband has never said, don’t do it. He understood that if I felt I could, then I probably would, so I’ve been very fortunate there. My girls think the business is great; they’re always asking me when I get home, ‘Where’ve you been today, who’ve you been talking to this week?’ They think it’s quite cool that I own a business!

I didn’t go for many business support organisations when I started. We got a small grant from Business Link when we started up, and got various support from business advisors.

The worst advice was from people who hadn’t done business themselves. Ex bank managers and so forth. They were people who had worked in that kind of field, but hadn’t got the passion of running their own business, or the understanding in what we were trying to do. They just asked for figures, which is not something I’m terribly good at.

We tend to listen to what businesses need. We’ve got a lot of help from Tedco who’ve been fantastic. Business Link were useful in the sense that I had people to talk to. It’s also really helpful to listen to role models. It could be a completely different business, but to hear their stories and how they started, which is often from nothing, is great. You start to think, I can do it because he’s done it.

People are very honest about their mistakes, and very generous with their time. I’ve picked up great advice from people who have said, you need to do this, or have you thought about that. That kind of knowledge could take a business forever to learn, and I could have wasted a lot of money and time in areas that I didn’t know anything about, but didn’t simply because I asked for help.

When I started out on my own in 2001, I tried to partner a local college so I could have a code of practice. I’d got people to a level 1 but I wanted to move them to a level 2 so I asked if I could run accreditation through them.

That college kept me waiting seven months. They’d said yes but then they didn’t bother doing it. My Business Link advisor said, why don’t you just do it yourself?

I thought, oh no I’m going back to college again. I like doing the creative stuff. I don’t like forms. But my advisor said you’ll never grow it if you don’t. She was right.

I went through all the stages of becoming an accredited provider. What I found was it wasn’t as bad a process as I thought it was going to be. It wasn’t even that difficult.

The problem with growing the business was that it would require all the things I wasn’t good at. Once I discovered that it was actually pretty easy, there was no stopping us. Except people.

We pay more than the university pays, so I could go out tomorrow and probably recruit lots of people, but they wouldn’t necessarily be right for the business. It is difficult to find people and get them engaged.

We have a core team of five people who are great, but we’ve also got fifteen consultants and associates. Managing those people can be difficult because it’s harder to engage them in the process. ‘Investors in People’ have been fantastic in helping us through that .

Our process is to invite people in as associates so they do some work with us. We then quality monitor that, invite them in for development meetings if we’re happy and get to know them really well. It’s all about knowing people so you can be able to trust them. Then they’re invited to join.

That process does restrict us. If you’re reliant just on people that you like to work with, then you’re closing yourself off to a lot of talented people out there.

On the other hand, that’s how we feel comfortable as a team, so that’s the way we prefer to work. It’s about a life culture as well as a business culture. I allow the people I work with to demonstrate their talents so they end up doing something that they believe in. In fact, we have a ‘grow your own culture’ here, making people part of what we do. We all share the same aims which is great.

We’ve got a cash pot share. At the end of each year we take a look at the profits and then I share out a percentage. People know what their salary is obviously, but then they can see the contrast with how well we did a particular year.

We’re very open with that process. We’re not going to horde it all away and buy something somewhere abroad, it’s about rewarding people’s commitment and effort, and people respond to that.

I’ve found that it’s been dead easy to delegate jobs. I’ve lost some of the one to ones with people, but I’m doing much more exciting things now.

I sit in on the Sector Skills Council and represent the UK on the board. I sit there, trying to pinch myself thinking, what am I doing here, they’ll find me out, I’ve got no right to sit here with these big important people.

Then you just find something that you know, or have an opinion about, and you realise your opinion’s just as good as anyone else’s.

It’s a really exciting thing for me. We’re changing (we hope) the whole way that this country is looking at it’s early years and childcare provision. We believe that playwork and creativity is something that’s unique to our culture.

There’s things about creativity that creates entrepreneurs, it’s all about taking risks in order to get something accomplished. If we risk assess everything, we can’t do this because we can’t take the money out, it’s the world gone mad. People need the ability to play in their lives, something that they’ve chosen to do so that they have control over it.

You can’t give people answers, you can only give them scenarios, it’s up to them to choose which one. We don’t need to sit children down and tick boxes. I’m part of something that’s changing nationally and that’s really exciting.

If you’re thinking of starting up your own business, do it, because anybody can. In fact, you can probably do more than you think you can and it’s probably the best experience you’ll ever have. It was the best thing I ever did. Make sure you ask for advice, but the main thing is passion: be true to yourself and recognise why you want to do it, and make sure that’s what keeps driving you.

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