💸 Holly Tucker MBE is a British entrepreneur, philanthropist, and UK Ambassador for Creative Small Businesses. She is the founder of the online marketplace notonthehighstreet.com and Holly & Co, a small business advice and inspiration platform.

💪 Above all, Holly is an ardent small business advocate and keynote speaker, committed to helping female entrepreneurs thrive by turning their passion into profit while building a happy and fulfilling life. 

💥 In today’s episode of The Wallet:

1️⃣ We discuss how you can build a business that looks and feels like you, the advantages of running your own company, and how to build confidence in those early days of entrepreneurship.  

2️⃣ Holly shares her experience of managing money and cash flow in her business, and the role that money plays in her life and work. 

3️⃣ As a founder, there can be a lot of pressure on you to ‘do it all’. Holly opens up about how she juggles work and home life, as well as self-care, and why she believes a balance of happiness, purpose, and profit is the key to ultimate happiness. 

📚 Holly’s new book, “Do What You Love, Love What You Do: The Empowering Secrets to Turn Your Passion into Profit” is out now! 

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You can listen (36 min) and subscribe here:

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1.Anyone can build a business

Have you dreamt of starting your own business but find yourself struggling with a lack of confidence?

Do you wonder what ‘the juggle’ of doing it all would look like in practice?

Have you questioned how important it is to launch a company that is uniquely ‘you’?

Holly Tucker has the sort of career background many of us would dream of: in 2005, long before the word ‘entrepreneur’ was a part of our everyday vocabulary, Holly Tucker and Sophie Cornish ‘sat around a kitchen table’ and came up with the idea of notonthehighstreet.com, when the two women recognised the need for an online platform that would give exposure to small businesses. Holly was just 28 when she started her entrepreneurial adventure that would eventually grow to impressive proportions: today, Not On the High Street has onboarded over 5,000 independent retailers and secured £21m in investment, reduced its losses, and saw a 19% rise in revenue.

All of this paved the way for Holly to launch her second business, Holly & Co, in 2018. Holly & Co. is an online hub of inspiration for small business owners, which reflects Holly Tucker’s passion to help small businesses get the exposure that they deserve. So, does Holly think anyone can run a business? ‘Absolutely,’ she says. ‘It just depends, in a sense, on your appetite for risk, your appetite for working hard, your appetite for controlling something.’ Fundamentally, however, Holly is a strong believer that starting your own business is the key to ultimate happiness. While Not On the High Street and Holly & Co. are very different businesses that Holly launched at very different times in her life, the golden thread running throughout both ideas was that she was always determined to help and empower others and to live creatively.

Holly believes that there are numerous benefits of being a woman in business, too. For starters, women tend to be the more empathetic gender, so when you really want to understand your customer, it helps to have that unique ability to truly and deeply empathise with their needs. When you build a business with yourself and others in mind, Holly says, it’s almost like you have an incredible superpower — to truly understand the heartbeat of your customer and the emotional journey that they go through, and to be able to tap into that, is something women are undeniably skilled at doing. Despite the fact that there are societal and structural challenges that women still face today — Holly, for example, grew up seeing predominantly male success figures in both her personal life and in the media — she believes that we will, as women, understand these frameworks and get through the labels that we are given.

When it comes to building confidence as a business owner, especially in the early days, Holly believes that your business has to have a great big vision, far greater than yourself. Having a purpose that is far greater than what you sell and what you do can give you great confidence because when we talk about making a change, we’re more motivated and confident that what we’re doing is not just blindly seeking profit, but also fulfilling our own and other people’s deeper needs. Confidence, however, also takes time — Holly recommends doing just “1% more a day”, and notice what areas you need to build your confidence in.

2. Don’t Underestimate the Importance of Money

One of the most important things to do when starting a business is to plot where you want to go in the long term. Planning the today and tomorrow is the easy part, but figuring out where you want to end up is where it gets tricky. Despite this, Holly says, not having a long-term plan is a huge mistake and one of the reasons why so many small businesses unfortunately fail. “Unless you look at the future and say right, I need to go North East, not North West. You will inevitably be faced with a North East or North West opportunity, and unless you have decided where you want to go, how will you know what route to take?”. Once you know your destination, it becomes much easier to plan your financial decisions, such as whether you need to have a board or raise funding.

Holly sees money as an opportunity to open doors. From an early age, Holly’s father, a Chartered Accountant, taught her about profits, sales, and losses. Today, Holly admits she’s a bit of a control freak — “the idea of not knowing what the financial health of a company is at any point in time…kills me. It’s the same with my own personal finances.” While it might be easy to fall into the trap of avoiding having to deal with our financial realities, Holly stresses it is important we don’t become ostriches and dig our heads in the sand: we have to do the work to untangle the baggage we may have built up over the years when it comes to how we feel about money. Being regular with checking up on your financial health is how Holly recommends we gain more confidence in our ability to manage our finances as well as keeping on top of all the admin (if you can, it’s worth hiring someone to do this for you!).

3. Ambition Doesn’t Have To Be Dented By Vulnerability

It might surprise you to hear, but Holly makes a point of not setting boundaries. “I don’t set boundaries on purpose. I think that boundaries cause stress.” Holly says that throwing the idea of having a ‘balanced’ life creates more unnecessary stress and that the way forward instead is to have a frank conversation with your family about your schedule and ensure that they’re happy and onboard. With the pandemic and working from home, Holly has found that she’s had an extra few hours in the day, and she’s finally begun putting herself on the to-do list on a daily basis. “It’s a long journey (to begin prioritising your needs above other things), but we go back to the 1% and asking yourself what change you can make that’s going to be a step in the right direction.”

RESOURCES: 

You can follow and connect with Holly at: 

• Instagram: @hollytucker 

• Book: Do What You Love, Love What You Do: The Empowering Secrets to Turn Your Passion into Profit

• Website: www.holly.co
  

Other resources:

• Starling Bank