Alistair Houghton meets MAGGIE O’CARROLL, chief executive of The Women’s Organisation

MERSEYSIDE can be an international beacon for women in business – that’s the upbeat message from the passionate Maggie O’Carroll.

She is the founder and leader of The Women’s Organisation (TWO), the Liverpool-based organisation dedicated to promoting female entrepreneurship.

Today, more than ever, the UK needs women to start businesses and create jobs to replace those lost in the public sector.

O’Carroll, who studied and worked in the US, says American women are much more likely to start their own businesses than British women.

She and the 37-strong team at TWO – formerly Train 2000 – are working to change that by giving women in the North West the support they need to set up in business.

TWO is putting its money where its mouth is by investing in the £5m Women’s International Centre for Economic Development (WICED ), which will open later this month in Liverpool’s Baltic Triangle.

The centre will include incubation units for small firms, support services and a research centre studying female entrepreneurship.

“It’s a commercial scheme in its own right. We have borrowed,” says O’Carroll.

“We’re taking the risk. This is an entrepreneurial organisation. We’re not just talking the talk, we’re walking the walk.

“We’ve never had any grant aid and have always operated by winning contracts and tenders.

“We don’t object to that. It’s a good thing. But this investment needs to be there for us to tender and deliver these services.”

O’Carroll grew up on a farm in County Mayo. Her widowed mother ran the farm until she was in her 70s, as well as bringing up five children – and her drive and determination have clearly influenced her daughter.

O’Carroll studied in the US before moving to join members of her family in Liverpool when she was 22.

“I found it very difficult to get a job,” she says. “It was quite a difficult time in Liverpool.

“I worked for a publisher for about eight weeks and we parted company. So I decided to start my own business.”

O’Carroll ran her business consultancy for three years before deciding to sell up and travel in Asia.

“On reflection,” she says, “there was a lot of overt sexism at the time. It wasn’t even hidden.”

O’Carroll returned to the UK after eight months and became a freelance consultant. But, in 1996, she led the creation of Train 2000.

“It was very much driven by my own personal experiences,” she says. “But there was a collective of women who came together to form a management committee.

“We’ve had a lot of support from the private sector, as well as from public agencies.

“Sometimes we get people who don’t agree, and who ask ‘why focus on women?’ But we’ve also met some real visionaries, who realise that this makes sense.”

Women, says O’Carroll, face several barriers when it comes to starting businesses. That includes the fact that, despite changing attitudes, women still bear the majority of caring responsibilities in the home.

Many women, says O’Carroll, also lack the confidence they need to start their own businesses – an attitude driven in part by a perceived lack of female role models.

“They may have the idea, but not the self-belief,” she says. “We want to show them that they can do it, and showcase women who have done it.”

O’Carroll said that businesses were often unwittingly family- unfriendly, with events including “business breakfasts” and evening drinks receptions being hard for women to attend.

That, she says, needs to change for everyone’s benefit.

“If it’s good for women, it’ll be good for men,” she said.

O’Carroll worked part-time for Train 2000 until five years ago, when she became its full-time executive and left her consultancy work behind. She has overseen the organisation’s growth into Manchester and into overseas markets, as well as its plans for WICED.

O’Carroll says WICED will be a national centre for research into women in business.

But it will not be a theoretical academic department. Its staff will work alongside real businesses in the centre’s incubation units, and talk to established female entrepreneurs using the centre.

The centre has already worked with the EU and the Spanish and Slovenian governments, to help them encourage women into business.

“We are an international centre of excellence in this field,” says O’Carroll.

“How did Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine start? Because people had a vision, and people came together. That’s a world-class institution now.

“Governments are looking at how to capitalise on the talent in their female population. This is becoming a much more marketable area of research.”

Last November, O’Carroll announced that Train 2000 – a name she admits became dated in 2001 – was being rebranded as TWO.

“With the building of the new centre, and our work expanding into the international field, it was always difficult to explain our name,” she says. “We needed something much more succinct that communicated what we were trying to achieve.”

TWO was one of the few social enterprises to exhibit at the World Expo in Shanghai last year, as part of Liverpool’s delegation at the event.

Going to Shanghai was a big deal for a small organisation. “We’re not Peel,” smiles O’Carroll.

“But we’d been talking to Chinese colleagues for a number of months before we signed up. Our board thought it was a good investment.

“The potential could be huge for a relatively small investment.”

TWO is also looking to the Middle East, and is talking to the Qatari government about supporting its mission to encourage more women into business. But, says O’Carroll,TWO will not forget its UK roots.

“We don’t want to internationalise to the point where we become just a local organisation that works abroad,” she said. “We are about helping women locally.”

O’Carroll is talking to the Government to ensure it keeps offering support to encourage women into business: “If it’s left to happen organically, it will happen too slowly,” she said. “You have to give it a bit of a push.

“If we want to see job creation through enterprise development and start-ups, and economic growth using entrepreneurial activity, then we need to put a lot of investment into that.”

In 2004, O’Carroll completed her Masters in Social Enterprise from Cambridge University. She still lectures part-time at Liverpool John Moores University on the social benefits of social enterprises.

Outside work, she remains a keen traveller, and wants to go backpacking around the world again one day.

But for now she is focused on helping women. It’s something she’s passionate about – and, she says, the success stories make all the hard work worthwhile.

“One of our first clients contacted me again recently,” said O’Carroll. “She emailed me out of the blue to say thank you.

“At the time, she had a very distressing life, and had been a victim of domestic violence. She had since left the city, got a degree, and came back to work in the city. With the right support, even though her life was chaotic, she did make changes.

“The way she has gone from having no qualifications to having a degree is testament to her and to all the women in the UK who are living in desperate circumstances.

“We have helped people turn their lives around. They do it themselves, but we give them the tools.”