Make your mark in the world

Nov 12 2007 by Emma Pinch, Liverpool Daily Post

Young women in Liverpool are being urged to consider starting their own businesses this Enterprise Week. Emma Pinch finds out where all the female Richard Bransons are hiding

‘I WAS a fat spotty kid from Anfield. I was an only child with older parents. Everything you would not possibly want to be, that was me.”

Some people point to their inauspicious background to justify underachievement. Clare Molyneux cites it as the “driving force” behind her extraordinary string of achievements.

Last week, the former cable TV weather girl was picked from thousands of entries to become Cosmopolitan magazine’s Ultimate Businesswoman of the Year.

An accomplished writer and playwright, she is the founder-director of a 30-strong educational theatre company, and in her spare time she rolls her sleeves up to revamp houses. All this at just 27.

While her start in life might have provided the initial impetus, unflagging optimism and boundless energy have been the most effective weapons in her pursuit of success.

“Living in Anfield when I did, when everything looked like a scene from Mad Max,” she says. “I knew by about 12 that three different kids by three different fellas and a black eye wasn’t the tribe I wanted to belong to. Then I thought, how am I going to do that?”

Writing was the answer. She struggled against her dyslexia and found she had a natural talent. By 14, she was writing stand-up comedy and by 15, she had had a play performed at every theatre in Liverpool bar the Empire.

This despite the fact that teachers – who she cheerfully describes as “fascists” – told her she could never pursue a career in writing because of her condition.

At 21, after studying perfor-mance art at Liverpool Community College, she took a job as a weather girl at cable channel Liverpool Live. Within months, she was struck by two major blows. She was made redundant from her job and then suffered the death of her father.

It had two major effects on her.

“I wanted to live every day and make him proud of me,” she remembers. “And I thought ‘no bastard is ever again going to have the power over me to say you haven’t got a job’.”

She set up as a self-employed drama consultant and was deluged by offers. After four and a half months, she started Open the Door – Theatre in Education. It creates performing arts programmes in over 500 schools, youth clubs, children’s homes and young offenders institutes every year.

It now has four teams of actors and 12 full-time resource facilitators with 17 stock plays covering subjects from car crime to sexual health and almost everything in between.

The death of her father also fired her in a second career direction.

“When my dad died, I didn’t want to be in the house where he had been so sick, so I talked my mum into moving.

“We bought this house in West Derby which hadn’t been decorated since 1970. Underneath the carpets, it was all cardboard and tin cans.”

They hired decorators on £80 per day but after five days had yet to properly start.

“Doctors at Alder Hey weren’t paid as much as they were getting out of our house. I took the hammer off them and put the kitchen up myself. Then I got a book out of the library and 16 bags of plaster and got going on the plastering.”

She laminated floors, fitted flag stones and landscaped the garden. Six months later, the house was worth three times what they had paid for it, and her property development business, Molyneux Estates, was born.

She is now a Corgi registered gas fitter with a City and Guilds qualification in plastering.