BRS Cleaning Contractors ltd

6 years ago in 2013, at the age of 21, I graduated in 2013 from King's College London with a degree in English literature. I had been planning to progress on to a Masters degree course but my husband was suddenly made redundant and we were struggling financially meaning that me continuing in fulltime education just wasn't an option. Faced with increasing financial pressures, my husband and I brainstormed about what we could do and as we've always worked well as a team we decided to have a go at starting our own business - even though neither of us had any experience of running a business or working for ourselves. We chose cleaning due to the low start-up costs, we literally started with nothing but a few cloths in a Fiat and a laptop from our rented flat!
I dealt with the sales, development and marketing side of the business while my husband dealt with the general logistics out on site, operations, training, etc as well as doing all of the cleaning ourselves at first until we could afford to employ our first staff members. We now have a team of over 50 employees and an annual turnover of over £1M, which is an achievement in itself to say that we started with nothing and have had no external lending or investment along the way.This achievement was recognised this year when we won 'High growth business of the year' at the 2019 SME Hertfordshire Business Awards and 'Family business of the year' in the construction and property sector at the National Family Business awards. For my role in 'putting our company on the map' so to speak, I have also won awards personally such as 'Young Entrepreneur of the year' for the South East at the FSB Business awards this year and 'Entrepreneur of the year' for London and the South at the Forward Ladies Awards, among others.