TYNEDALE LIFE MAGAZINE : Hexham Courant Newspaper

Published on 27/09/2007

IT’S a growing phenomenon of life in the Noughties, like shrinking mobile phones, a TV channel for each day of the year, and residential problems for polar bears. The businessmum – a mother who juggles a kitchen-table career with changing nappies, testing bathwater and curing teethers’ colic – has arrived.

Latest figures show home-working has grown by almost 20 per cent in the last decade, from 2.8 million in 1997 to 3.5 million today, and women are taking full advantage of this economic attitude shift. Example: Computer giant Microsoft says more than 90 per cent of its UK staff now work ‘flexibly’. Example: Northern-based independent travel agency Travel Counsellors has more than 750 consultants – at least half of them women – who work almost entirely in their own homes.

The multi-tasking businessmum has evolved world-wide, and Tynedale has some thriving examples. Three such local superwomen are Louisa Rosbotham, Sarah Walsh, and Lisa Cunningham, all from Hexham. Their children range from one year to two and a half, and the trio met over the scales and feeding charts at baby clinic. They soon realised they had more in common than recent motherhood. All three were running or planning to run a business from home. Louisa, with almost eight years of travel agency experience, had joined Travel Counsellors as a home-based holiday fixer. Sarah, by profession a university researcher, was aiming to develop her artistic skill into a personalised-gifts company.

Lisa, after a long and demanding career in sales, was focusing her new-found baby obsession on designing a web directory for anything and everything ‘kiddie’.

Their first joint business effort was the launching of a new toddlers’ group for Hexham last summer. They brainstormed for a catchy name – Movers to Zoomers – which summed up the nine months-plus target age group. They secured a venue – the Trinity Church Hall in Beaumont Street.

They sorted the group’s charity status, financial base and insurance cover. They agreed on its organic-snack only ethos. They initiated a website, but didn’t need to activate it because enough customers just toddled through the door. Under a year later, Movers to Zoomers, now held at Hexham’s West End Church Hall, is full with a waiting list.

The personal businesses of the trio are on different footings. Louisa works for a large and growing company, has webcam workmates to call on and a head office at the end of a phone line. Lisa and Sarah are their own bosses, starting small and pursuing their own ideas.

The three share many reasons for adopting the juggling lifestyle. Money is a big one. The shock of losing a large proportion of the family income upon the arrival of juniors Rosbotham, Walsh and Cunningham inspired these businessmums to seek new salary sources which could work alongside their new responsibilities, but without incurring huge childcare costs.

Sheer entreprenurial zeal is also a powerful factor which keeps them juggling. They have all amassed skills – from sales and research ability to creative flair – which they are loath to lose, and brains they are keen to keep honed.

Yes, Noughties mums have come a long way from those mothers of previous generations who settled into maternity like a comfortable old tracksuit, and focused their intellects on rashes, weight gain (baby’s) and ground rice versus grated carrot...



Sarah Walsh - Age 32 - Designer

SARAH Walsh is quite a boffin, qualified to Masters’ level in medical anthropology and a part-time university researcher in Newcastle. So when she wanted to start her own home-based business after her daughter was born, she implicitly trusted her impressive little grey cells to correctly compute her optimum commercial potentiality...

They came up with cute cows, fluffy sheep, decoupage flowers, glittery balloons, and plenty of stick-on sequins. And those little grey cells of Sarah’s were not wrong.

Following this hunch she launched a website-based company, Framed Names, to produce hand-made, arty pictures for kids’ rooms. In less than two years it’s averaging 2,000 new hits a month.

Parents, grandparents, godparents – anyone with a tot to spoil – have been lapping up Sarah’s quaint designs, blissfully unaware that each adhesive rhinestone has been tweezered into place by a Master of Science.

The first recipient of a Walsh Framed Name was Sarah’s daughter Kate...“with a little persuasion and help from my hubby Terry, who is a professional media designer,” said Sarah.

Friends and family were enthusiastic. Sarah plucked up courage to show her Framed Names at the annual Christmas art exhibition at Hexham’s Queen’s Hall. She took her first order within an hour and Framed Names was in business.

“Since then we’ve had requests from the Isle of Wight to Alloa, and even some interest from Australia and the USA!” said Sarah.

Now her challenge is to tweak her Framed Names website www.framednames.co.uk to ensure it gets caught in any potential customer’s Net trawl.

“There is an art to making sure that, if someone Googles for ‘personalised presents’, your website is listed near the top,” said Sarah.

“We are also contacting big companies like Blooming Marvellous, Getting Personal and the Great Little Trading Co. to get our link on their sites.”

Sarah still works as a researcher, but it’s her crafty career that gives her the most buzz.

“It’s brilliant to think my pictures are happily hanging in children’s rooms all over the country,” she said.

“And I like the idea that the success or failure of this business is down to me. It’s pure excitement. No time for TV any more – I always have a design idea rattling round in my head.”