Mums The Business was started up by me, Robyn Hatley, in 2006.  It was never my intention to run my own business, but looking back at how I arrived here, I now know it was meant to be! It’s such a cliché’, but I love helping people, and always knew my future career would have this focus.  Having studied Counselling Psychology a good few years back (!), I “fell” into a Human Resources career immediately after leaving university.  It was, as I felt at the time, my perfect job – helping others, particularly in their career development, through career counselling and psychometric testing….

Over the years, I climbed the HR ladder of success, but it came at a price, moving focus from truly helping individuals in their careers to strategic HR, budgeting & organisational development. My HR career began to lose its sparkle and I was just not that fulfilled by it any longer...I decided to start a "life coaching" course to renew my people focus, and also purely just for the distraction from my own unhappiness.

Having returned to work after both my children were born, I began to face a life and career crossroads - I was desperate to spend more time with my young children, I was being encouraged to move further on up the HR success ladder, and I was facing the prospect of moving abroad every 2 years (my husband is a professional sportsman). I needed an objective listener to whom I could pour out all my fears, confusion, hopes and dreams. I found a fantastic coach, and through a lot of hard work (and sometimes tears!), the fogginess of what I really wanted soon began to become clearer. I wanted to achieve my own definition of a balanced life - spending precious time with my family, but also enjoying a fulfilling career.

Today, I still place a very high value on coaching and with my own coach, continue to live my life intentionally, knowing how to achieve my goals and now having the confidence to do just that.It was through starting up my own business from home, that I realised the incredible hurdles faced by mums wanting to do this themselves. Start up, I believe, is often the most difficult part of running a business successfully - not only are there the practical aspects of where to begin and what steps to continue with, but there's a whole lot of confidence to be found! What makes me a good coach for mumpreneurs starting their own business? I believe that apart from my career counselling background, it is the fact that in the not too distant past, I have done just that - started up my own mumpreneur business. And I'm about to do it again with a second business as my youngest child approaches school-going age (watch this space!).

But most of all, that I am passionate about what I do, and about what I believe you can do too...