From washing cars to building businesses – my story so far

I have always been ambitious. At secondary school when thinking about my future, I’d have images of owning a large house in Roehampton Lane. Why a house in that particular street? Because I spent my 8th and 9th year living in two of them.

No, I’m not from a well-to-do family. My parents separated when I was 4 and my mother raised my sister and I in a council flat in Fulham, on very little income. Hot water bottles kept us warm. We shared bath water once a week. I had hand-me-downs from my older sister – which were purchased from charity shops to begin with. My mother tried her hardest to support us, working part time while striving to get her musical career off the ground. Our humble, 2 bed flat would sometimes become a music studio with mum singing and playing guitar, a bass player, rhythm guitarist and keyboard player (thankfully, no drummer!).

The three of us joined a group of family friends with their children, to go and live in a house in a road within walking distance of Richmond Park. It had no electricity supply and no heating (I was too young to know why that was) and after a year, we were asked to leave so moved in to the one next door, again with no basic utilities. As kids we didn’t care. The novelty of the huge garden made up for it; with fruit trees to pick from and large shrubs to hide in. Our cat (Claudius) loved the freedom and for the first time started bringing mice into the house. We’d all get together in the main drawing room, light the fire and tell ghost stories in between singing songs along to live music, courtesy of our mother and her acoustic guitar.

So the taste of this kind of life gave me the drive to work towards it in later life. “I will have a house like this – and raise a family in it.”

At 13 I started a car wash business. I hand-wrote business cards and popped them in letterboxes around Redcliffe Square in Earls Court. After washing about 3 cars for £5 each (which would take 1.5 hours per car) I decided this was not such a great money-making scheme…

I moved around quite a bit while growing up: Fulham, Acton, Chelsea, Kent, Earls Court, back to Fulham, back to Kent and back to Chelsea which didn’t help my school and academic life. The year that O-Levels changed to GCSEs was the year I left school – at 16 without sitting a single exam. I wanted to earn money and going through university (as recommended by family and teachers) seemed way too long a process in order to start my working life. After a few unfulfilling jobs I worked as a silver-service waitress in an exclusive private business members’ club in Belgravia.

It was there that I met the person I wanted to spend the rest of my life with – who I could imagine raising a family with in my dream home and location.

2 years later we were married with a baby son, living in temporary housing in Stratford, East London and my husband worked all hours as a chef to support us. 6 months later we moved from London to the historic town of Bury St Edmunds, in Suffolk – a place I knew nothing about except that a couple my husband knew lived here. 18 months later our daughter was born and it was time to move to a larger house. I’d already been fighting for a relocation by sending letter after letter and making call after call to the local authority – we didn’t have a deposit to purchase our own property. We eventually got moved to a good sized house on the Norfolk/Suffolk border in the September. By Christmas my husband and I separated.

There I was, with a 3 and 5 year old, no car, no job and no income. As soon as they started school I started studying. I started a degree in Computing and IT with the Open University while having several part time jobs.

With what I had learnt I started a web design business. I had a good eye for design. What I didn’t know, I outsourced to students that I communicated with via the Internet. I got quite a few clients and got a full page feature in the East Anglian Daily Times about single mother entrepreneurs!

2 years later in 2001, I got involved with a building company who were developing a software system to price up their jobs. It was so good that we decided to start a software company and put it on the market.

None of us had run a software business before, so there was a lot of learning as we went along. I built the website and managed the marketing and design that helped get the business off the ground. On many nights I’d still be working at 4 or 5am designing brochures, CD inserts and other marketing materials – often printing them myself on my inkjet printer!

As the company grew, my role grew with it. By 2002 we were exhibiting at the UK’s largest building shows and advertising in trade magazines as well as online. We turned over £127k with a small profit of £26k. From 2003 we had 18 sales agents across the UK and Ireland, whose contracts and complicated commission structures I managed alongside the marketing and other responsibilities.

We had so many customers that we found it hard to support them all. Builders were our market, some were not IT literate; being in construction.

The success of the business finally meant I could buy a family home – and I made large improvements to it – so it became the type of place I’d imagined having all those years earlier.

In 2010 (after 9 years of working long hours) I decided I’d had enough. My children were then 17 and 15 and I wanted to spend more time with them. I took a 9-5 job as a business manager in a garden design company, where I gained an NVQ in Business Administration and a Practitioner Licence in Prince2 Project Management. The designer won Gold medals at Chelsea Flower Show and part of my role was organising the plant and tree orders with suppliers for the show gardens, also managing JCLI contracts with multimillionaire clients. I had no knowledge of landscape architecture and was employed purely to manage and market the business, office and projects.

In July 2013 I was made redundant. 2 weeks later I was offered the role of UK Marketing Manager in a global business coaching franchise company (ActionCOACH). They were so impressed with my marketing and business experience that they gave me the sole responsibility of managing the national marketing; not only to gain new franchisee coaches, but for their 70+ existing coaches around the UK.

During my time there, I learnt so much more about business success which made me even more determined to once again, be my own boss. My children were 20 and 18 and a lot more independent. So in November of 2013 (3 months later and after some thought) I left the job to start a marketing and design business, with the global coaching company being my first client.

The name ‘bellüber’ comes from my family name (Bell) and the word über – which means super (I’ve been called a superwoman for juggling work, house and children!)

and here I am, years later…

I originally wrote this article in 2015, when Belluber was still a relatively young business.

More than a decade later, I’m still running Belluber, still designing websites, still helping businesses with their marketing and – thankfully – still loving what I do.

The technology has changed enormously since I built those first websites, but a lot of what I’ve learnt along the way hasn’t: understand the business, look after your customers, communicate properly, do what you say you’re going to do and don’t spend money on things you don’t actually need.