Defining Moments
- Author:
- Angela Brown
- Business:
- Training in Childcare Ltd
- Published:
- 10/11/2008 11:14:00
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.
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.
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.