Hi Deborah...

 

What took you from a teenage school leaver to Dragons’ Den and Strictly?

MY STORY:

DEBORAH MEADEN

I did not come from a wealthy family,

but I always felt safe and nurtured,

which is the most important thing

your family can give you.

I was born in Somerset, my parents

divorced when I was young and I moved

with my mum and sister to Essex. My

mother remarried and I had a new dad

and then two more sisters.

It was a happy childhood, but I never

felt comfortable with the concept of role

models. As a small child I liked chatting

and playing and I liked people …I still

do. But I was never that focused unless

something REALLY caught my attention.

At school I was good at things I

loved, like History and Maths, but that may have been all about the teachers who inspired me and grabbed my attention. If they didn’t enthuse me I would

spend most of the time looking out of the window.

For teachers who didn’t grab my attention,

I must have been a bit of a nightmare. It

was the same with sports. I was always

quite good, but never the best. I got used

to being third or fourth, but that never

bothered me, unless it was something

that I really valued and wanted to do well

in.

At Trowbridge High School I carried on

much the same. My father recently dug

up my school report and I couldn’t believe

how accurate their assessment was. I was

good at subjects I was interested in, and

bad at subjects I couldn’t be bothered with.

I engaged in quite a bit of verbal backchat. I was really good at that and I still love a bit of verbal jousting. I always loved challenging people, including teachers, and that must have driven them crazy. But in challenging everyone and everything, my confidence just grew and grew.

I left school when I was 16,

studied business at Brighton Technical College and worked as a sales room model. I moved to Italy when I was 19 and set up a ceramics imports business whose outlets included Harvey Nichols. It didn’t work out but it taught me a lesson about working on a project that isn’t going anywhere. You can’t keep slogging your guts out doing the same thing and going nowhere. You have to take a step back, see what’s wrong and fix it.

Along with a partner I bought

one of the first Stefanel textile franchises and sold out two years later. In 1999 I borrowed a small fortune and completed a management buyout, grew the

business and six years later, sold the company at a time it was providing holidays for more than 150,000 people each year, which generated over £11m a year. I then began investing in other businesses, Dragons’ Den followed …and so did Strictly Come Dancing.