Before I started my own business my circumstances weren’t that great. I came from a family of six kids brought up on a council estate. We had no money, and I left school with no qualifications whatsoever. I didn’t have any confidence at all, which nobody would ever have believed now!

I married very early, divorced very early, but when I divorced I decided to go back into education. I did a portfolio, then A Levels, then foundation, then degree, to finally completing a masters in Fine Arts, never knowing from that very first step where that was going to lead me. I never dreamt of the big long term goal of having my own business, because I just didn’t think I was good enough.

The main thing that got me through was life skills. I went to university with a load of eighteen, nineteen, twenty year olds and I thought they were so much better than I was until we got into groups and started working together.

The fact that I was practiced in managing time by getting the kids off to school and all that, really helped. I really think that if you can do the household budget, you can do business finance. If you can make a Sunday dinner and all the time and preparation that goes into that, you can project manage, simple as that.

During my masters, I saw an opportunity. We were supposed to put an exhibition on and there were ten students on the course but not one of them wanted to take responsibility for it. So I went out and raised sponsorship and tried to get people interested in any kind of way possible. I ended up raising £20,000 just by putting the word out to people.

We had a very successful exhibition, with a dozen billboards around Newcastle and Gateshead advertising it. I’d sold all my work and at the end I stood in the gallery with my combat trousers on and wads of cash in my pockets. It was totally unbelievable.

I just saw an opportunity from there: there was a business to be created. Normally, artists don’t get the opportunity to sell their own work and they can’t talk to their customers. Why not just put the two and two together?

My business partner Hilary came on board with me. She was a fine artist and had been through the same process as me and we’d kept in contact. Hilary said right at the beginning that she’d like to do this with me.

I began to worry because I thought the business wouldn’t make enough money to sustain the two of us but Hilary said I don’t care I want to do it anyway because I love the idea.

We had lots of people telling us, don’t do it together, don’t do things as friends it’s a bad move. But it’s worked out really well and we’re able to bounce ideas off each other.

Musa was born. We created a not for profit company that represents regional art. We take any artist that’s in the region and give them professional practice; put on exhibitions for them, help them sell and hire out their artwork to individuals or big companies.

The barriers I faced in setting Musa up were pretty enormous. I had no idea how to run a business and had never done anything like it. I didn’t even know anyone who’d done anything like it.

I’d done a little bit of research into this type of company and discovered that a lot of people had tried it and fallen flat on their face. I looked into it and found that they simply didn’t envision something big enough. Their businesses had just a handful of people.

The timing was probably wrong for them as well. When we started, the Baltic was opening and there was a burgeoning art scene taking place in Newcastle. So I thought, we’ll just go for it with as many people as possible.

I went to Business Link for support, who were absolutely diabolical at the time because all they did is say, right ok, you live in South Tyneside, go to Tedco, and just cut me off.

With all places I think you find good and bad business advisors, but I went to Tedco and luckily I had an absolutely fantastic business advisor. We worked through things together slowly until we got to the point where she could leave. But she didn’t, she stayed with us and she’s still here now, still giving us support.

Me and my business partner Hilary also took a lot on ourselves. We went to other businesses to talk to people who’d been there, done that, people who were right up there enjoying huge amounts of success. We used that ‘help’ word instead of ‘time’ or ‘advice’. That word really worked and loads of people did give us help. We also learned that once you got in front of somebody for an hour or so, they would give you more names.

We’d put together a questionnaire to bring along, quite sneakily, with ten or twelve questions. What we found was that those questions brought people into a good conversation, which we held it face to face. The last question on our questionnaire was, if we started this business, would you be interested in helping us? They all said, yeah, absolutely.

My biggest strength is probably my mouth. I remember at one point I was going to a certain business which I’d been to many times before for sponsorship. I got there and the director wasn’t there, he was just leaving. He had apparently said, Carol Metcalfe’s coming, give her whatever she wants because she’ll get it anyway. I just thought that was brilliant.

I always think you should do business with people. Don’t do business with a flyer, a business card, or any kind of article; you do business with the person so you have to connect with them. You don’t even have to talk about business, you might just talk about what car you drive, or isn’t this bloody boring?! If you’re networking you don’t have to talk about business, but do say something that when they go away, they’ll remember you.

We do it by using the Musa name. It’s Latin, and stands for one of nine goddesses of the arts. We thought, nice small word, easy to remember, we’ll go with that. We tell people this story, then we add onto it there was a couple of mistakes and we found out afterwards that musa was also some kind of acronym for a radio antennae, and it was also a banana plant. But we just stick with the goddesses. And everybody remembers us because of that.

Everyone kept coming up to us in the early days and asked us who did our PR. We were thinking, are we supposed to have someone who does our PR? We must be doing it wrong. But apparently we were doing it right, yet all we were doing was applying some common sense. Someone’s going to pay much more attention to a story in a newspaper than they would an advert, plus it will cost you nothing. So we thought, let’s see how much PR we can get with stories. A lot apparently.

We were doing different things with exhibitions, with the media behind us. Then we decided to do something completely different. We went to Blackfriars restaurant and asked, when’s your quietest time? Jan/ Feb. Right ok, when’s your quietist day? Wednesday. Then we said, if we take your restaurant off you for a day, fill it in the night time, they’d all pay a set price for a meal and we’ll do something to get them in there, we’ll get great media coverage, are you up for it?

We got four life models (life models meaning no clothes), blocked out all the windows in the restaurant and put the word out to people that it was invitation only, and you come along and have a life drawing class.

We didn’t put the word out to artists; we put it out to the business world. At lot of people at first said oh yeah that’s a great idea. But a couple of weeks before not many people had signed up for it.

I quickly got on the phone and asked what’s going on, why aren’t you coming? People said they’re really scared because they didn’t know how to draw properly. I tried to explain that it wasn’t about that; it was just about having fun.

The restaurant was full by the night time. We got Radio Newcastle and the Journal to do a bit of coverage. The TV companies wouldn’t touch us though: not a human interest story I think was the words they chose.

We had a fantastic night, everybody joined in and people were putting their drawings up around the restaurant. At the end of the night we couldn’t get the models to put their clothes back on and we couldn’t get people to leave.

The next day we got slots on the radio, and the TV companies, BBC and ITV, both put the event into their news coverage in the morning shows. Someone worked out for us that it would have cost £30,000 to get that kind of coverage. It cost us £500, and people are still talking about it now. In business, everybody has to be creative.

When I first sat down and thought about the goals I wanted to achieve, on paper I’d said that I wanted fifty artists in the first year, and the big term plan was to have a Musa in every region; a not for profit company, helping the region’s own artists. I never believed the bit that went on paper, not for a minute. At the time I just thought I was that thick girl who left school with no qualifications. If we could keep going for the first year, maybe we stood a chance.

I didn’t have any business management experience, didn’t know anything about finance, and when we were doing the financial forecast I was amazed that we were predicting figures, and setting out what we needed for the first year which was £80,000. I thought if we could make that it would be brilliant but it seemed like a goal that was so high, it would be almost impossible to achieve.

We held our first exhibition within a month, and from that we made £20,000. Next month we made another £17,000. We were well above target, and in the first year we made half a million. That was absolutely unbelievable. But that then causes other problems: managing money.

The biggest challenge was probably trying not to waste the money we’d earned. It sounds really silly, but you don’t expect to have all this money, what the hell was I supposed to do with it?

Looking back I probably could have done things differently. In the first year we held sixteen exhibitions, all in different settings. Each took quite a bit of money to put together, and I probably wasted some here and there. But, on the plus side, those exhibitions generated a lot of PR. So if I had the chance to do things differently I’m not sure I would. I might not have ended up with the same business so I don’t regret anything we did.

All it takes is determination. If you’re determined you’ll get through anything. There’s two ways to set up a business; you can either do it by the book and look into everything. Or you can go ahead and steam roll over it all, but chances are you’ll get there and you’ll be able to keep going.

The moment we won at the Blueprint awards for business plans was just fantastic. We were against all these business school graduates, all dressed nicely in their suits. Then there was myself and Hilary as two middle aged artists.

We got through the first heat, but when it came to the finals we believed we had no chance whatsoever. We thought, they’ve already got a winner picked out and there’s no way we would have won it anyway; we were pretty sure one of those science and technology businesses were going to win.

When we did our presentation, I thought the judges looked bored silly and they hated us. I didn’t even want to go the night time awards show. But in the end we thought, let’s just go and enjoy the wine. We weren’t going to get back on stage anyway so it’ll be fine. We started drinking as soon as we arrived and proceeded to until about 10pm.

During an interval, we went out into the foyer and saw there were loads of posters of all the finalists displayed there. We thought, that’ll look nice in the office, if we’re going to come away with anything, it might as well be that. So we nicked a poster, rolled it up and put it under our arms. By the time we got back into the hall they’d all started again and we were late, so we sneaked in and got back to the drinking.

When they came to announce the winner, they were going on about passionate people and a great creative company and I’m thinking, bastards! Those were the words I’d used! Then they said that we were the winners. We were totally gobsmacked. We sobered up immediately and went to collect our award. They gave Hilary this big glass trophy and handed an envelope to me.

My husband came over to me later and said do you know what’s in this envelope, you should probably take a look. I did and said, god, we’ve won £10,000! We were the only people in the room that didn’t know we’d won that. Everybody else had entered to win £10,000; we were just doing it for the fun and prestige of it.

The judges later told us that nobody apparently had a patch on us. It was our passion and determination that did it. I think you can either be an optimist or a pessimist, and I’m an optimist so I think that if you work hard enough, you can do it. If you’ve got enough passion and determination, you can do it, and you can overcome anything.