Name: Grace Owen     Age: 38
Occupation: Director

Grace Owen Solutions was launched in 2003. Grace is an accredited coach with over ten years’ experience of enabling individuals, groups and organizations achieve their goals. Her specialist areas are executive coaching, facilitation and consulting.

Vision: “At the eve of 2000, I was feeling confused and frustrated with my life, particularly my career, so I started to explore the possibility of working for myself. I’d been at M&S as a learning and development specialist for almost 11 years and thought that I needed to see if there was life outside of that, so I resigned. Another catalyst for my decision was coming across coaching on a personal development weekend. Once I understood more about life coaching, I realized that I could create a career from it.”

Funding: “To be honest, I didn’t know anything about starting a business, so I contacted Business Link, did my training and signed the relevant sole-trader documents. The nature of my business was very much a virtual one. I had a home office but worked on client’s premises and also worked at a complimentary health centre, so I didn’t have high overheads. I started the business with £1,000, and my start-up and running costs were relatively low.”

Challenges: “One of the major ones was self-belief. Could I do this? Would anybody pay for my services? I’d been in a corporate environment for 16 years, and the challenge was more about me overcoming my internal obstacles and proving that there was life outside of being a corporate employee.”
 
Top tips:

1. Do your homework in terms of understanding your market and clientele. Be clear about timing. I normally tell people to work on the basis of a two-year transition plan.
2. Really raise your self-awareness. Understand your strengths, your potential weaknesses and areas where you will need some help. It’s important to develop your knowledge as you’re going along.
3. Have a support network. It can be very lonely when you’re starting a business, so find a mentor, get involved in a local networking group or join a peer group based on the specialist field that you’re going into.