Speaker Five.
Although my grandparents and uncles ran a shop for many years, I really didn't have much contact with the business world. I started my working life in nursing which I enjoyed a great deal, and then I had what I felt was a life-changing experience. In my late twenties, I applied to go on secondment overseas to work for four months in a remote rural hospital. It was there that I saw some marvellous work being done in setting up small-scale businesses run by local people-mainly in the production of handicrafts for catalogue sales. I saw a lot that I felt could be applied in my own home environment. Anyway that's how I got started. I had a few hiccups at the beginning, mainly in trying to co-ordinate the huge amounts of customer information, but now we're well established.