If We Can, You Can

Author:

Carol Metcalfe

Business:

Musa Fine Art Ltd

Published:

10/11/2008 11:14:00

The moment we won at the Blueprint awards for business plans was just fantastic. We were against all these business school graduates, all dressed nicely in their suits. Then there was myself and Hilary as two middle aged artists.

We got through the first heat, but when it came to the finals we believed we had no chance whatsoever. We thought, they’ve already got a winner picked out and there’s no way we would have won it anyway; we were pretty sure one of those science and technology businesses were going to win.

When we did our presentation, I thought the judges looked bored silly and they hated us. I didn’t even want to go the night time awards show. But in the end we thought, let’s just go and enjoy the wine. We weren’t going to get back on stage anyway so it’ll be fine. We started drinking as soon as we arrived and proceeded to until about 10pm.

During an interval, we went out into the foyer and saw there were loads of posters of all the finalists displayed there. We thought, that’ll look nice in the office, if we’re going to come away with anything, it might as well be that. So we nicked a poster, rolled it up and put it under our arms. By the time we got back into the hall they’d all started again and we were late, so we sneaked in and got back to the drinking.

When they came to announce the winner, they were going on about passionate people and a great creative company and I’m thinking, bastards! Those were the words I’d used! Then they said that we were the winners. We were totally gobsmacked. We sobered up immediately and went to collect our award. They gave Hilary this big glass trophy and handed an envelope to me.

My husband came over to me later and said do you know what’s in this envelope, you should probably take a look. I did and said, god, we’ve won £10,000! We were the only people in the room that didn’t know we’d won that. Everybody else had entered to win £10,000; we were just doing it for the fun and prestige of it. The judges later told us that nobody apparently had a patch on us. It was our passion and determination that did it. I think you can either be an optimist or a pessimist, and I’m an optimist so I think that if you work hard enough, you can do it. If you’ve got enough passion and determination, you can do it, and you can overcome anything.