Marketing & Business Coach
About
Claire
I help women business owners make more sales and more money through smarter marketing. I know it works, because it saved my own business.
Where It Started
In 2010, my business collapsed.
My marketing agency’s biggest client went bust overnight. They owed us thousands. I used the tax money I’d carefully set aside to pay my staff and suppliers, hoping I could steady the ship.
I couldn’t. I chose to liquidate before it got worse and walked away personally liable for a £20,000 tax bill. I had a two-year-old. Bills. And a lot of embarrassment. I resigned as chairperson of our local business club. I felt stupid, humiliated, and ashamed.
But here’s the thing. Before the agency, I’d built a marketing consultancy to six figures. By myself. The problem wasn’t that I couldn’t do it. The problem was I’d done it without any vision, any direction, or any plan. I just said yes to everything, priced too cheap, worked every hour, and ended up building a business I hated.
“I didn’t want a job. I wanted to be at home with my little girl. But I needed to earn a living doing something I loved. And I needed to do it properly this time.”
The Rebuild
The Girls Mean Business was an accident.
I started it as a sideline to keep me occupied while I figured out what to do next. I was just sharing what I knew about marketing and helping other women with their businesses. But it took off.
This time, I did things differently. I got really clear on what I wanted. I created a vision for my business and my life. I knew who I wanted to work with (women business owners), how I wanted it to fit around my family, and what I wanted to earn.
I paid off the £20,000 tax debt within six months. I built TGMB into a business I love, working part-time from home in North Yorkshire. And my five-year vision (the dream house in the country with land and a river) came true two and a half years early.
Not because everything went smoothly. It absolutely didn’t. But because this time I had a vision, a plan, and the marketing knowledge to make it happen.
What I Do Now
Making marketing a lot less complicated
I’ve been self-employed for a long time. I’ve built businesses that worked brilliantly, businesses that made good money but took over my life, and businesses I was very glad to see the back of. I’ve made plenty of mistakes along the way too, which is probably why I’m so practical about business now.
These days I help women work out how to get more people seeing their business, turn that attention into customers and sales, and make marketing feel a lot less complicated.
That might mean figuring out what to post when you’ve completely run out of ideas. Getting your email list working properly. Filling empty appointments. Selling more of your products. Getting people onto your website. Working out why something you’ve been trying for months isn’t actually bringing in any sales.
I’m not interested in making small business marketing more complicated than it needs to be. Most of the time you don’t need another platform, another enormous strategy or another six-month plan.
You need to know what’s most likely to bring you more customers, do more of that, and stop wasting your time on the stuff that isn’t working.
That’s what I help with.
I live in beautiful North Yorkshire with my husband, teenage daughter and our little dog Meggie, in our dream property with 5 acres of land, a river, lots of beautiful trees, a barn for my husband’s business and a cottage for my mum. It’s not bad for someone who was £20,000 in debt and wondering whether to get a job at Tesco.
Fancy a hand with your marketing?
The Small Business Marketing Club is £12 a month at the moment, and every month you get your marketing plan already worked out. Come and have a look.