Dear Sacha,
Firstly, you’re pretty amazing. You won’t believe that for a long time but trust me, you really are.
Right now, you’re 18 and you’ve already been through so much. You’re living in supported housing with a drug addict that leaves the house in a state and steals your things. Before this, you were homeless after being kicked out for the second time aged 16, so you lived in a hostel, even during your GCSEs. Yet you still go to work every day developing your people skills as a receptionist at a property company and pay your bills even though you’re left with no money afterwards.
People expect you to be happy and grateful you’re alive, but why should you be? You should be living life, not struggling to survive. Why did you even bother getting those As at school? Well, the GCSEs won’t matter soon but I’m still glad you did and discovered your talent for writing and music.
By 21, you’ll be in a decent job working for a FTSE 100 company and for over six years you work really hard and get a couple of promotions along the way.
A few years later, the most amazing thing happens, your daughter Jaya. You’ll finally have a purpose and Jaya will literally save you. You go back to work when she is 10 months old, the same time you become a single mum. Three months later, you buy your very own four bedroom house. You’ll start feeling really positive, ready for a fresh start but then a month later, you’re made redundant. You nearly lose the house and you’re back to having days with no money for food, but even when you don’t, you always make sure Jaya has enough to eat.
Don’t worry though, you finally find another job. At first it’s great, but sadly you soon realise this is the worst employer you’ve ever had, and after a poor relationship with management, you leave after a year.
You find another job quickly but unfortunately, or fortunately as it will transpire, the company declines your request for flexible hours. So, again, you do the brave thing and resign, with no job to go to. Yes it’s probably a little bit crazy but Jaya needs you.
After a month of looking for a flexible role and finding nothing, you focus that frustration on what you can do about it as opposed to the usual self doubt. You decide it would be a good idea to create a recruitment agency specifically for parents to help them find good jobs that don’t force them to choose between family and a career, while also helping employers to improve their workplace diversity in an effective and ethical way.
After six months of planning, raising £400 of crowdfunding for a market testing event, securing a mentor through the Prince’s Trust, generating lots of PR and a £10,000 business loan via Virgin Loan – all while unemployed and, yep you guessed it, completely broke again – you launch Premier Parents Recruitment in April 2016. You become a director of your very own business at 30 and, like everything, you do it all by yourself.
It’s hard and you’re constantly frustrated with the resistance you face from employers that have so much ridiculous stigma about working parents, that you’ll want to give up lots of times, but you never do. Slowly but surely, you start to develop the brand and establish yourself as a well-known entrepreneur in the local and online business community and you’ll secure partnerships with major brands such as Bella Italia, Central College Nottingham and Metropolitan Housing.
You move a couple of long-term unemployed people into work, you deliver the courses you designed helping isolated lone parents develop confidence and employability skills. It takes a while, but you start to realise the power behind your story and all that you have overcome and how sharing it can inspire others.
So, you see, everything you’re going through right now is preparing you for something bigger and better. You wouldn’t have been able to set up Premier Parents without your resilience and you certainly wouldn’t be able to influence and inspire people if you hadn’t lived your life.
Today, your daughter is happy, so clever and she loves you. We’re not rich yet but give me a few years as the business goes from strength to strength.
I’m still a work in progress but a strong woman, great mum and becoming a great leader. I’m proud of you and lots of people agree. Keep going Sacha, the best is yet to come.
Sacha
Sacha Atherton is the founder and director of Premier Parents Recruitment
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