Rachel Elnaugh's business was all about giving adults 'experiences'. Her company, Red Letter Days, offered everything from fast-car driving and helicopter flying to eagle handling, and organic gardening with Bob Flowerdew.
But in the past few months Elnaugh has had more experiences of her own than perhaps any normal person might want or be able to cope with. Her business went bust with debts of £12 million. She also remarried, gave birth to her fourth son, and is once more grilling budding tycoons as a panel member in BBC TV's Dragon's Den.
As if that wasn't enough she has also become chief executive of internet company Easyart.com and is steering the business towards a £10m flotation next year. Meeting Elnaugh today you find the 40-year-old undefeated by the setback of seeing RLD fall by the wayside.
Elnaugh has been chastened, burnt even, by the plug pulled on RLD by her creditors. But what exudes from the 'renewed dragon Elnaugh' is her apparently inexhaustible energy. She is unstoppable: all you can do is let her tell it her way.
It is ironic, she says, that her first love was art but that she was prevented from following that path when she left school. She recalls: 'My head at Chelmsford County Grammar put on my UCCA report "Rachel is far better at maths than she is at art".'
She had been studying art, maths and economics at A-level and her teacher's 'hurtful assessment' meant she was turned down by all five of the universities where she wanted to read art history. 'It was not very helpful,' she says in her understated way.
She set out as an accountant and founded RLD at the age of 24. Asked why she was drawn to entrepreneurial business life, she says: 'It may be unpopular to say so now, but Margaret Thatcher was my role model. She, and those like Anita Roddick [Body Shop] and Debbie Moore [Pineapple Studios], were groundbreakers and had guts.' Both were crowned as Business Woman of the Year and it is not difficult to see why Elnaugh took such delight at herself being shortlisted by Veuve Clicquot the year Barbara Cassani won the title.
It is also obvious that Elnaugh enjoys the limelight and recognition of being the only woman panellist on the reality show Dragon's Den
She says that she has a 'naughty girl' and 'rebel' in her nature. That is why Jeffrey Archer is an enduring hero of hers. His words 'you will never make real money working for someone else', have stuck with her. 'I admire him for even in the couple of years he was in prison, writing a book out of his experience and making something out of a time of adversity.'
What kind of impression does she think she gives for women in the business world? 'I want to be a role model for anyone who has to overcome adversity. The ending at RLD was so stressful, even more stressful than I realised at the time. But now I can see it as a huge liberation. I am not good at sitting wallowing in a hospital bed or at home. I am action orientated. At the end of the day business is very hard and male-run. Vultures literally do gather in the branches just waiting for you to trip up.
'I was very vulnerable around the collapse period. Yes it was even harder being a woman boss. Trying to refinance you when you are out here and eight months' pregnant was very difficult. They didn't admit it to my face, but I heard later they turned me down because they just couldn't imagine me, with three kids already, being in the game long term.'
Elnaugh remembers bitterly her dealings with Grass Roots, the organisation which, after months negotiating a trade sale, pulled out unxpectedly while she was on honeymoon with her new husband, Chris. She gave birth to her fourth son three weeks later while 'still living and breathing trying to save the company' and broke hospital rules to set up a meeting the same afternoon.
'You have to accept the lows and move on,' she says. Now she is boss in very different enterprise. Easyart was launched in 1999 by founder Simon Matthews with capital from Brainspark, which put in £2m. Matthews is quitting to become a psychotherapist and Elnaugh has just had her first fortnight in charge. She had a salary of £250,000 at RLD, she says, and at its peak the company had a staff of 150. Easyart.com is, she says, Europe's biggest online seller of art, but is a prime example of the smoke and mirrors of the modern dotcom world.
Her office is in the back of the Air Gallery in the smart Dover Street world of real art movers and shakers. However, she says: 'I have no room for meetings and interviews.' So the real hub of her new business is not in London's Mayfair but Uckfield, West Sussex, where the majority of the 30 IT, operations and picture framing staff work.
'Six years is a long time for a VC investor to wait. Easyart is not a half-baked start-up now and will make its first, small profit this year. My task is to take it to a public float within three years with a value of between £5m and £10m. What I have found about the art sector is it is run by very aesthetic people who are not very good at business.'
Elnaugh turns coy when asked what is in it for her. 'I've been so slated and do feel I have unfinished business. I've put in a six-figure sum for my 20 per cent. If things work, I will get a serious reward with a seven-figure sum in three years.'
About Easyart, she says: 'Someone needs to turn the heat up on the marketing burner. I'm going to be opening up the thinking and bringing in retail knowledge. They have been missing a few tricks. But the infrastructure is far superior to anything I had at Red Letters. You can say that was my fault and I say I know. If there is one lesson I have learnt about that collapse, it is "Don't allow yourself to climb down a well". I was making decisions based on inaccurate information, and that is worse than not having info at all.'
Elnaugh attracted criticism for her handling of the staff at RLD, but she remains unabashed: 'If you are tough, as you have to be, and making tough decisions, you will always find disaffected employees. But any male boss is far more ferocious than I could ever be. I'm making sure I'm not the mad machete-wielding, woman.'
About her attitude to women in business, she says: 'I don't want to be pigeon- holed into only helping women. However, I think we have a lot to offer. The female way is much more intuitive, more collaborative. Less about money and more about values. I see women changing the business landscape not by running giant companies but by increasingly being the most important consumers, who make companies change what they sell.'
In a delicious irony, RLD was rescued by two of her fellow Dragon's Den panellists. 'I get on really well with them. I felt like a pilot of a plane and knowing it is going to crash, and my attitude was like a pilot in that situation, trying to save as many people as possible.
'So soon into my new job, I haven't yet found the magic DNA. But I am thinking laterally and beginning to dream again. The typical customers are Barratt Homes first-time owners, not the rented flat, Ikea-going, throw it away-type art buyer. I am not a big corporation person, but I am looking at taking Easyart into the wider art market.
'Maybe this means we will be doing deals for big corporate HQs. We should also be making more of the 500,000 hits a month the website gets and looking at joint ventures with travel companies.'
Elnaugh calls her biggest previous success 'taking something from peanuts, nothing, to being a brand leader'. Can she prove her headmistress wrong by being good at both maths and art?
Profile
Name Rachel Elnaugh
Born 12 December 1964, Chelmsford, Essex
Education Chelmsford County Grammar School, then tax correspondence course
Family divorced, remarried, four children
Career joined Arthur Andersen in 1986, left in 1989 left to found Red Letter Days. Shortlisted for Veuve Clicquot BusinessWoman of the Year 2002
Hobbies Gardening, painting
