Sponsored by
A4e boss Emma Harrison's road to success
FROM teenage angst to business glory - that's the story of A4e boss Emma Harrison, as Star Women's Editor Jo Davison has been finiding out.
"I just watched TV all day. It gets to the point where you don't go out because you're thinking; I'll just watch this programme, then I'll do something. Then another one comes on and before you know it, half the day has gone...
"Looking back I think I was depressed. I used to wear the same clothes every day and lost interest in myself."
These could be the words of any number of people who have been caught up in the downward-spiralling misery of unemployment.
In fact, they are from the mouth of one of South Yorkshire's savviest businesswomen, a self-made millionairess who is on first-name terms with Britain's most senior politicians, employs 3,000 people and lives in a mansion in Derbyshire.
Emma Harrison is chair of A4e, the global multi-million-pound training company which strives to encourage enterprise and help the long-term jobless get back to work. And what fuels her desire to chip away at the mountainous near-million on the scrapheap is the fact she was once on it too.
The mistress of Thornbridge Hall, who only last week addressed an audience of 4,000 business heads and politicians at the Albert Hall, says she knows only too well about feeling like a failure. She can empathise when clients tell her there's barely any point in getting out of bed to greet a world which is only ever going to be grey.
Now one of the country's leading welfare-to-work proponents, Emma reflects: "I was in my late teens and it was a miserable time. I can remember it vividly. I'd just failed my A Levels; I was supposed to have been going to study medicine but suddenly my whole future, the one everyone had mapped out for me, had just disappeared."
She was jobless, down and out of the loop for about a year; "I lost my way; I didn't know what I was doing or where I was going. I didn't seem to fit in anywhere," says the woman who drove A4e from a small company set up to retrain redundant Sheffield steelworkers to an operation spanning ten countries.
"It was probably friends who got me out of it in the end," she remembers. "They encouraged me to find a new sense of purpose. I decided I'd never really wanted to be a doctor anyway; I'm squeamish for God's-sake. What I wanted to be was an engineer and got myself back to college.
"I followed what was in my heart rather than what was expected of me and I've done that ever since."
She worked in engineering, then joined her father's training company, but eventually set up her own in 1991. Multi-million pound Government contracts followed, the Sheffield-based company now has a 200m-turnover and operates in 11 countries.
Emma is also a mentor and supporter of many small businesses, a non-executive on the board of the Institute of Directors... and is fast becoming known to the nation as telly's determined but kindly benefits-buster.
She ditched her wealthy lifestyle to look for worthy causes to give her money to on a council estate in Dagenham for Channel 4's The Secret Millionaire. Two years later, in August 2009, A4e featured in two episodes of the series Benefit Busters and earlier this year Emma was on screen again, guiding four celebrities in the BBC1 reality series Famous, Rich and Jobless.
Actor Larry Lamb, TV gardener Diarmuid Gavin, Noel Gallagher's ex Meg Matthews, and model-turned-mechanic Emma Parker Bowles had agreed to swap their fame and fortune for a world of joblessness, surviving on the poverty line.
How does she feel about being described as telly's face of social and welfare reform?
"It's cool; it's what I wanted to be," says the woman who often employs a simple technique to help her dreams become reality; she writes them down. The process is, she believes, a small, positive first step towards achieving. It clearly works; when I interviewed her four years ago she told me that getting into TV was written on a list in the top drawer of her desk.
The TV shows give her the clout to lobby "the powers that be," she explains. "Politicians, even Prime Ministers do watch these programmes," she says knowingly.
She hopes PM David Cameron and Secretary of State for Work and pensions Iain Duncan Smith will be watching the one she has just finished filming for Channel 4. The Wager sees her transform the life of John, a 21-year-old East Londoner who was "the hardest study the researchers could find."
Emma proudly pulls out a handful of photographs of a handsome young man in a sharp city suit; John. "He had been on the wrong side of the law for most of his life. But when ten of his friends went to prison, he gave up crime. He hadn't been able to get a job he had literally sat watching TV for 18 months. His life was collapsing around him," she explains. "I could see so much potential in him. He is one of the brightest young men I've met in a long time."
After six weeks of Emma's mentoring and contacts-tugging, John is now working with a top London accountancy firm and earning 17,500 a year.
"We proved that the holistic method, looking at the whole person and getting to know their stories and their problems really works," she says.
Not for A4e the bullish, gung-ho approach to getting the nation's million long-term unemployed up off the sofa and off to work with threats of benefit withdrawal; Emma is insistent people need to be handled gently and sensitively.
"These people's issues are really complicated. The only way is to get a trainer involved with them is on a one-to-one basis, so they can get to the root of it."
'Long-term unemployed' applies to anyone who has been jobless for a year or more; it is acknowledged that the longer someone goes without a job, the harder it becomes to get them back into the workforce. They are not all lazy sods just not wanting to work. It's not necessarily about the education or the work experience they've had either. Emma says it can be about low self-esteem and fear.
She has seen a whole family whose joblessness boiled down to the death of its first child. They were all trapped in grief.
But frequently, it boils down to attitude and Emma says 24 years of experience means she can spot a mile off the people likely to become another LTU statistic.
"Put five people in front of me for two days and I could pick out the most at risk," she says. "Those with an unwillingness to look around, a fixed point of view and an unwillingness to take advice - as Larry Lamb displayed in Famous, Rich and Jobless - they are the people."
With women who can't get a job, the problem is usually low self-esteem. They think they have no skills to offer and see their personal issues, like not having the right clothes, as the things that are holding them back.
"Much of that must be to do with their upbringing; being taught that you're second-class because you're a woman."
That attitude pervades to the highest level and it drives her mad. "I still get it thrust at me," she says. "Haven't you done well for a girl," people say. Top city types assume I'm in London to do shopping when actually I've just come from a meeting with the head of Rothschilds.
"You can be a successful as you like but you're still the exception. I just laugh when it's said to me, but I can see how it puts so many women down."
Awards Recognition:
* Emma is in the running for a trailblazing women's award.
* Now in their sixth year, the First Women Awards recognise women at the top of their professions who are paving the way for the next generation.
* Fashion designer Nicole Farhi CBE was a recent winner and Emma has been shortlisted for the Public Service award.
* Winners will be announced on June 23 and finalists include the only female cutter on Savile Row, BSkyB's head of drama, White Stuff CEO Sally Bailey and the investigative journalist dubbed "the warrior queen of MPs' expenses".
* Diana Brightmore-Armour, CEO of Corporate Banking at Lloyds said: "The 2010 shortlist is extraordinary and shows we have tremendous senior female talent. Over the years, these awards have discovered incredible success stories from women who have demonstrated outstanding determination and resilience. Recognising them is vital to creating the future UK business and community leaders of tomorrow."
Got a view? Leave your comment below.
Follow The Star on Twitter and Facebook:
For breaking news and sport follow The Star on Twitter at www.twitter.com/sheffieldstar and Facebook at www.facebook.com/sheffieldstar.
JOIN THE STAR READER PANEL: The Star is YOUR newspaper, so tell us what you think about it and what you want to see - CLICK HERE.
Don't miss our daily pull-outs - only in the The Star: Monday Star Sport, Tuesday Class Act; Wednesday Business; Thursday Grassroots; Friday Time Out; Saturday Retro. Subscribe to The Star - CLICK HERE
READ MORE
Join the Star reader panel
Main news index
Your letters
Features
South Yorkshire's environmental news
Kids Zone
More business news
More Rotherham news
More Doncaster news
More Barnsley news
Latest sport
Email to a friend
Print this page
Looking for...
Featured advertisers
Jobs
Search for a job
Motors
Search for a car
Property
Search for a house
Weather for Sheffield
Tuesday 07 February 2012
Today
Cloudy
Temperature: -6 C to 2 C
Wind Speed: 8 mph
Wind direction: East
Tomorrow
Sunny
Temperature: -4 C to -1 C
Wind Speed: 8 mph
Wind direction: South
