S3 Ep 14- Leading Beyond Expectations: Reinvention, Inclusion & Legacy with Fara Butt

Fara Butt never expected to lead a manufacturing business.

Originally training as a teacher, she was on the path to becoming a headteacher before gradually finding herself helping to transform her family's mattress manufacturing company. Today, she is Managing Director of Shire Beds and President of the National Bed Federation.

In this conversation we explore what it means to reinvent yourself without losing who you are.

Fara shares how growing up as the eldest of five daughters in an ambitious immigrant family shaped her confidence, why teaching made her a better leader, and how she helped transform a traditionally male manufacturing environment into a more inclusive workplace.

We also discuss visibility, unconscious bias, succession planning, creating cultures where people can flourish, and why leadership is ultimately about helping others succeed.

Finally, Fara reflects on legacy, her hopes of becoming a writer, and why we should never allow other people's expectations to define who we become.

If you've ever questioned whether it's too late to change direction, this conversation is a reminder that careers rarely follow a straight line—and that's often where the greatest growth happens.

Connect with Fara on Linked In - https://www.linkedin.com/in/farkhanda-hussain-butt-9929205b/

 Visit Shire Beds website -  https://www.shirebeds.co.uk/

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 ✨ Produced by Mary Gregory Leadership Coaching

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Hello and welcome to G Leads Collective Podcast. I'm Mary Gregory and I'm so glad you're here. This podcast is a space for honest conversations about what it really means to lead as a woman today and how we can all show up with more courage, care, and clarity. You'll hear from inspiring women, powerful allies, and bold truth tellers who are changing the game not by playing tougher, but by leading smarter, softer, and stronger. Hello and welcome to this week's episode of the She Leads Collective podcast. What happens when the path you are expected to follow isn't the one you choose? And the one you do choose puts you in rooms where you were never meant to belong. Well, my guest today is Farah Butt, managing director of Shire Beds, a family manufacturing business she helped transform from the inside out. Farah began her career in education on a path towards headship, shaped by a strong upbringing in a family of five daughters, where achievement and independence were non-negotiable. But life and leadership rarely follow a straight line. Pulled into the family business, Farah stepped into a male-dominated industry she initially found daunting. What followed wasn't just a career shift, but a reimagining of what leadership could look like, blending the empathy of a teacher with the commercial rigour of business and the courage to challenge industry norms. From painting the trucks pink to shifting a business from turnover to profitability to changing who feels they belong on the factory floor. Farah has quietly but very powerfully reshaped both culture and performance. And now as she looks towards legacy writing and her role as president of the National Bed Federation, she's asking an even bigger question around her impact, legacy, and broadening her identity. Farah, a very warm welcome to you.

SPEAKER_00 2:08

Thank you, Mary. It's lovely for me to be here.

SPEAKER_01 2:11

It's lovely to have you here, and I really appreciate you giving up your time. So I'm going to kick off the conversation really to explore your background and how that's influenced what you've actually ended up doing in business. So you grew up as the eldest of a family of five daughters with parents who were very clear about their expectations and what success looked like for you. How did that affect you growing up?

SPEAKER_00 2:40

As you said, Mary, uh success and achievement were really non-negotiable. And I mean that in the nicest way, really, because we were all expected, there were five of us as we were growing up, five girls. I was the eldest, uh, and I had four younger sisters. And my mum devoted herself to being the best housewife and the best mother that she could be, and part of that meant that she was going to bring up her girls in a way that she could be really proud of. I think it came from the fact that she'd always valued education herself, but coming from a rural community, she didn't always have that opportunity. So she wanted to make sure that her girls had every opportunity to achieve in the educational sphere that they could. So she placed a very high emphasis on the importance of education and learning. I mean, this was also sort of demonstrated by the fact that uh while she didn't follow a formal education when she came to this country, she did attend a lot of um eSOL classes, English as a second language classes. She learned how to drive, she learned um how to uh there were lots of other skills that she picked up. She was always very good at sewing, but she learned how to knit as well. So she was all she always had a learning mindset. Uh we call it that growth mindset now. So I think given that she had that growth mindset, that is what sort of set out her expectations of her daughters that they also had to achieve because they had to grow and they had to flourish and they had to fulfil themselves. So I think that was her measure of success. It wasn't always as a formal success, you know, that they had to achieve this, that, and the other, but initially it was always about you know them growing and flourishing, and that was important to her.

SPEAKER_01 4:37

And you've described her as a tiger mum and a feminist. How has that shaped you as a woman and as a leader?

SPEAKER_00 4:45

Well, absolutely. I mean, you know, my mum affected us, as I said, to achieve and to um do really well in our formal education as as well as learning things out of school. She wanted us to uh flourish in every aspect of our lives, and that gave us the confidence to believe in ourselves. I think had she not had those expectations of us, you know, we possibly would have settled for something far less. But because she had those expectations of us, we always wanted to prove that we were good at what she wanted us to be good at, which was education in the first instance. So there's that desire to impress, that desire to show off to her, that desire to kind of please her as well. But in that respect, you know, the fact that you achieve, you get a lot of positive feedback. You know, it's good for your own self sense of self as well. So, you know, the more you achieve, the more you feel good about yourself, and the more you go on to achieve further as well. So it became self-fulfilling that sense of achievement.

SPEAKER_01 5:45

Very positive cycle is what I'm hearing as well. Um, and your parents made a lot of sacrifices for you as you were growing up because they were immigrants and obviously starting a life here in the UK. How conscious were you of that when you were growing up?

SPEAKER_00 5:59

We were conscious that my father worked extremely hard. He came to work in the mills. He worked in the mills for long hours. Uh, this was before our time, but when we were growing up and we saw him going out to work initially on the buses, and then he had his own sort of taxi business and then his own battery. We saw him work very, very long hours to make sure that he provided for his family. We saw our mum work to maintain the house as immaculately as she could, and that had a huge effect on us that we saw two hard-working parents around us. So hard work became part of uh just our normal everyday. Yes, it was your ethos.

SPEAKER_01 6:36

Absolutely. And you trained to be a teacher with a very clear path ahead in terms of your career. What did that represent for you at the time?

SPEAKER_00 6:45

When we were growing up, when we moved to more formal education, which was whether we were going to go to university, my mum at that point had it clear that she wanted five different careers for her five girls. And being the eldest, you know, she saw that I was good at teaching my younger sisters. So we sort of it wasn't ever discussed or formalised, but I sort of fell into the the kind of teaching career. I was always doing it informally anyway, teaching my younger sisters, playing the teacher role at home, um, you know, creating them little workbooks. And I loved doing it, so it sort of fell naturally that I would go on to become a teacher. I loved school as a child, I absolutely loved being at school, I loved the learning aspect of it. You know, I I I would say I was fairly good at it as well, and uh, I never really wanted to leave as well. So, you know, what would be better than to carry on at university and then could go back to school again? Continuing something that you loved.

SPEAKER_01 7:36

So, was there ever any tension between what was expected of you and what you were drawn towards? Or did you feel that you were drawn towards what was expected of you?

SPEAKER_00 7:45

For me, it was a a natural career progression. I mean, I I ended up doing what I absolutely loved. I'm not so sure about my other sisters. I think some of them might have had different ideas of what they wanted to do. One became a solicitor and a politician later on, and one went into the medical industry. I think she quite wanted just to be a hairdresser at one point. One was is an accountant, one is a pharmacist. So there may have been slight tensions, but they went on to fulfil those ambitions, their secondary ambitions, their other ambitions in other ways. So it didn't really stop them from having both careers, you know, the one that they had formerly and the ones that they went on to pursue as a their dream career as well.

SPEAKER_01 8:26

Yes. So it sounds to one degree you had a career or you started out in a career in teaching that you really loved and that you were enjoying, but then you actually pivoted into then moving into the family business. And it didn't happen in a dramatic way, it it kind of was more of a gradual thing that you moved into the business. What was actually happening for you in that point in your life?

SPEAKER_00 8:51

Um, I'd become head of English, uh head of English department at a secondary school, and I was working extremely hard. I then had my third child at that point, but the plan always was to go back to full-time teaching and pursue that career and become a deputy head and then a head teacher. However, during that time we ended up doing one a television programme with Segeri Robinson, which involved the whole thing. Uh and secondly, given that we were doing this television programme, I started, as I call it, tinkering around in the business, you know, sort of looking at things that could be improved, could be done better. So it was done in the sort of gentlest of ways, really. And eventually it sparked my interest, and I ended up doing it much more fully and you know, developing it as a second career.

SPEAKER_01 9:41

Does sound like a real natural curiosity, particularly um when you met Sir Jeremy Robinson, that sparked your curiosity even more, and that's how you managed to then get yourself more involved.

SPEAKER_00 9:52

Yeah, so Sir Jerry Robinson came into the business via a television programme, which we all enjoyed doing, and it was to look at the business and how to improve it. And I suppose we hadn't really worked on the business as a family, and that's what that program did. It allowed all the family to work on the business, to look at the good things as well as things that needed improving. And that again is that growth mindset that I talked about. The fact that we weren't just passively going and knocking nails and making beds and you know putting fabric on things, but we were actually looking at how we could turn this entity to evolve for us to grow this entity, and that was the thing that excited me about it, rather than the actual making of the products, which was the operations side, was continuing anyway. But that you know, we weren't getting involved on the operations, but we were getting involved with the transformation of the business.

SPEAKER_01 10:46

And that's what you got really, really curious about. And I mean, I can't imagine what it must have been like because you had three children. Um, you were working part-time as a teacher at one point, and tinkering is not the right word because you were doing much more than that. You were being very curious and looking at how you could make the business work most efficiently. How on earth did you navigate all of that?

SPEAKER_00 11:10

Well, teaching was in my DNA, and it was in my, you know, it was part of me for a such a long time that it seemed really hard to let that go. But getting involved with the business and realizing that actually is you know, imparting learning and learning myself could still be sustained in the business world, that became a bit clearer to me. I didn't really want to lose that ability not to learn myself and not to impart learning onto others. And when I realized that there was opportunity to do that in the world of business as well, I was able to see that the similarities between both aspects of my career. Yes, there was a formal teaching that I was doing at school, but what I could do was to bring changes and bring learning to a greater number of people in the business, and and and I think that's that helped me navigate the two careers quite effectively. And how did your husband support? Well, initially, I think they felt that the you know the business was something that they did because there was a lot of it was operations, you know, bits of factory, we made things, there's a shop floor, and because we had followed that migrants, traditional migrants' journey where my parents and my mum, my father had worked in the mills, my mum would kept the house, he had never expected his children to work in what they saw as labouring work. You know, they they expected their children, migrants always expect the children to go and work into um go and work in uh white-collar jobs, which is what we all did. My husband had a slightly different approach. He had come from big business, he'd worked at Big Deal Works and he'd joined family business, and you know, he wanted he had the similar mindset to myself where he wanted to transform the business into something that was bigger and more professional. So, given that we had the same objectives in mind for the business, I think it worked out quite nicely, and he was very supportive of me joining him. And how did you work together as a in terms of caring for the children as well? Children, they they put all kinds of demands on you. Fortunately, at that time, the children were a little bit older, they were at school. That sort of division of labour at home, yes, at times it was hard work for us because there were three of them and they were quite excited, you know, energetic children. But he was very supportive at home, you know, he understood that I had a career. You know, he didn't kind of believe in the fact that his place was at work and my place was at home. We shared that bit of our life. Um, you know, he was very involved with the children's upbringing. You know, we shared the pickups and the drop-offs. The fact that he worked, you know, he had his own business, we could do that at times. So when I had my ghoul days, he would do the pickups and drop-offs, and when I had the factory days, I could do them, so we could share a lot of it. We were very fortunate. We had our parents around, they did carry a lot of that. So, you know, you you sort of get through it really. But he was very supportive.

SPEAKER_01 13:58

So it was real teamwork between you and your family. Yes, absolutely. Yes, fantastic. So you moved into a very male-dominated environment. What did you find most confronting about that?

SPEAKER_00 14:10

The factory at the time when I joined it was all male. There were no females at all in the factory at the time. And it was such a shock because at schools you do have a very diverse, you know, staff. So when I joined, that was that struck me and in a way that I thought I need to change this somehow. But I couldn't do it in one fell swoop. It had to be a cultural change, it had to be, you know, a change which people adopted and adapted to slowly. So, you know, one of the first things that we did was my sister following the programme joined with me and um, you know, we worked on it together, so there were the two of us. We started being more visible around the factory, which was almost initially a kind of a no-go space for women. You know, we just didn't go out there for reasons, as I've said before. It was, you know, it was a factory environment, women weren't expected to be there. But we started walking around the factory, and we just thought, well, you know, if we do it, then we can start to bring other women into it as well. So you made yourself visible pretty soon? It was a visibility thing, absolutely. I then remained there. The low-hanging fruit was the office because it was a um a sort of separate area. So I started when appointments became available, you know, making sure that there was an opportunity to appoint a woman, I would do that. We then started building a team in the factory, and I didn't want her to feel isolated as I had done initially when I first joined, so it was always building a team of women on the factory floor. So we now have women working on the factory, which is a huge transformation from where we were at the beginning. At the same time, the factory evolved as well, you know, it's a more welcoming place. It has it would meet it now meets the needs of women as well. So, in terms of a separate space for them if they need to pray, if they need to eat, we have those separate spaces if they should require them that they feel comfortable. In actual fact, women actually have kind of really integrated into the factory and into the teams that we have, and it's wonderful to see that really here. How we thought they might stay as separate as a separate group, but they've actually absorbed the Shire culture and have become very much part of the Shire team, and that's really wonderful to see. But you know, we have women now who are in our sales force, we have women who are in the office. Um, you know, it's uh we had at one point we had a woman driver as well.

SPEAKER_01 16:38

We don't at the moment, but if there's an opportunity, we will because you've you have transformed it from being one that was solely male to actually being a very balanced workplace. How did that go down with the men that were there in the first place?

SPEAKER_00 16:51

As far as I'm concerned, I think we still need to evolve and grow and reflect the population out there. You know, 50% of the people in this planet, 51% are women, and therefore workplaces should try and reflect that. You know, because we did it gently and we did it in a natural way, and we didn't sort of enforce it whilst I believe that that's you know, equality is very important and diversity is very important. We didn't change it overnight, you know, we did it in a natural way, and we took everybody along with us. I mean, there were some jokes around the fact that when we painted the trucks pink, people had a laugh and joke about that, especially the men, who wondered, you know, whether it was probably going a little bit too far. But you know, we stuck to that. Uh it was more of a marketing exercise rather than anything else, and they did understand that. But it's all been positively received. And the fact is that the culture was set by at from the top. If there was an expectation that, you know, if I'm going to be walking around the shop floor, then women have a right to be on the shop floor as well. And because of that, it was just generally accepted. That's very good.

SPEAKER_01 17:54

And I think what I also am impressed by is that you've utilized your teaching skills as well as your business skills here, particularly when you bring women on. So tell us a bit more about how your teaching skills helped you, particularly in the early days when you had women who were maybe feeling less confident about stepping onto the factory floor.

SPEAKER_00 18:15

Yeah, I mean, teaching requires a lot of coaching, it requires a lot of support. I mean, there's a formal aspect of teaching, but there's so much more that happens in a classroom. And as I said, you know, that becomes part of who you are as a person. So naturally, my door was always open to the women. My phone is available to them. If they have any concerns, they can call me. They know they can talk to me, they can raise anything that might be to do with work, but it might be outside of work as well. And I offer them that open door so that they feel very comfortable being in this place, and there are no subjects that are out of bounds for them. You know, I'm not just their boss, but I am there just to support them as well. And that's very, very important. Yeah, so you're you've absolutely got their back.

SPEAKER_01 18:58

Now, I we I want to touch on the on the area of of unconscious bias actually here, because you talk about at home, you weren't aware of there being any bias because of your upbringing. You were you were a male a female-dominated family, five daughters, your mum and your dad. When did you first become aware that biases existed? And how did that change things for you?

SPEAKER_00 19:24

Yeah, I mean, in terms of gender bias, we were very fortunate that we grew up in a very female-oriented household, and you know, success was a huge expectation of us, and you know, we achieved very well. And so I suppose you have we overcame a lot of gender biases through our early part of our life. However, there were sort of racial biases that we learnt to navigate. You know, it was a time and an era we might hear certain things, but you know, certain approaches, and in hindsight, we now understand that they were not just biases, but there was sort of you know some element of racism there as well. But again, part of the way we overcame that was to sort of break smash some of those ceilings in our you know achievements and prove that you know we could be just as good and if not better. I think going back to my second career in business, um, because I was very fortunate in teaching, where an understanding of bias is much greater, you know, because as teachers we are imparting a view of the world to the next generation which is fairer and which is more balanced and which touches upon some of those inequalities of gender and race, etc. So I think in my teaching career we I was fairly shielded from that. However, when I joined the world of business, I joined a very male-dominated environment, and I realized then that there were conversations I was not part of, and just slight things like sort of turning up to a board meeting, and um the men you knew had already had a conversation before you'd got there because they were all sort of using them similar language, uh, and you know, you kind of thought this isn't coincidence, this is because they've actually got a little click here, and so that realisation of gender bias became much more apparent in my business career than it was in my teaching career. And how did you handle that? Well, to be thick skinned about it, you know, we what you have to do is you have to say, Well, yeah, it's happening. Yes, I can't let this stop me from being in this room, and it I can't let this stop me from putting my point of view forward, and I can't let this stop me from wanting to still have an impact and have an have achievement in this area of my life. So a lot of grit and determination, but that upbringing that we'd had had probably trained us to to be able to deal with situations like this.

SPEAKER_01 21:49

That strong sense of self belief would have helped, is what I'm hearing. And what does inclusive leadership look like in practice for you today on the factory floor?

SPEAKER_00 22:00

Well, inclusive leadership is obviously making sure that everybody who we employ has been given the best opportunity to achieve. If I see that there are talents in people to make sure that we develop those, it's about keeping good people and you know progressing them. It's it's not just a simple, well, yes, I would like more women, you know, represented, I would like a more diverse workforce, but it's also about developing skills and talent amongst my team as well. And so wherever we see that skill and talent, we need to make sure that we retain that for our company and for our business as well and develop those people.

SPEAKER_01 22:35

And um, I know that quite early on when you were just getting into the business, you and your sister focused on profitability rather than turnover. How transformational was that for the business as well?

SPEAKER_00 22:48

Yeah, I had a huge learning curve, a very steep learning curve, um, when I moved from education to business. Uh, in education, you're very much shielded from the economic impact of things. You know, it's done very differently. If you want a project, generally, if the money is available, it happens, but you don't really worry about um, you know, whether there's uh money in the pot to be able to do that. Business is completely different. I was very fortunate that the sister I worked with was the accountant, and so her mindset is all about accounts and profitability, etc. So she taught me a lot. She one of the first things she did was to reduce the business by 25%. She got rid of what we thought was our biggest accounts because she said they were the least profitable. In fact, they were not just uh least profitable, they were actually making us losses. So that was a huge decision for us to make. However, we we did that, and we realized we were more profitable, and that gave me the confidence to focus on that bottom line more than the top line very early on. And that was quite transformational for the business as well, by the sounds of it. Absolutely, and we've had to go back to resetting that that particular mode of working every so often because what happens in business is you know, you sort of go through periods of growth and you might take your eye off, you know, the bottom line a little bit because you're so excited by the fact that you're growing, and then you know, you kind of come to the end and you realise, well, actually, yes, you might have grown at the top, but the bottom line isn't really performing as it should. So, you know, every so often we would have to sort of look at some of our accounts and have a bit of a cull, but we weren't frightened to do that, you know. In the past before my arrival, I think it was all just about the growth, and I think we've now realized that it's very important to grow and make profit as well. You know, if if accounts are not beneficial for our business or you know they're not they're creating losses, we have to look at them differently. You know, we have to, you know, adjust and amend them.

SPEAKER_01 24:40

I also know that in the early days you also lost an agent who wasn't happy working with women. How did that land for you?

SPEAKER_00 24:47

Yeah, I mean, one of our biggest earning agents, you know, refused to work with uh my sister uh and myself and has said he refused to work with women. But in the and partly that was to do with the fact that we may we were women, but I think partly it was because she'd seen, you know, very clearly that the agency was not working for us, and therefore, you know, unless he changed and he wasn't willing to do that, he didn't have a space in our organisation.

SPEAKER_01 25:14

So it was a bit of a two-way thing then? It was it was a two-way thing. Okay, okay, it's just interesting to see the responses that you get when a woman takes over the business and how some people, you know, I know it's a few years ago now, but just not receptive to that at all.

SPEAKER_00 25:31

Yeah, I mean there was we could have come out of that quite differently, you know. We could have worked with um the agent and we could have transformed, looked at the counts and looked at the ones which were perhaps uh doing well for us and looked at ways in which we could have improved the ones that were making us losses. Uh, but he wasn't open to working with uh with us at that point. I mean, that was the way that we, you know, go about things now. You know, if there are uh accounts that agents have that perhaps might not be working, you know, we we we we we discuss these things and we you know kind of discuss them openly and we look at ways in which we can improve. But uh the previous agent uh he just wasn't prepared to take any advice, any discussion with a woman, really. And because we had taken responsibility for that aspect, we weren't prepared to let go of it and hand it back to you know how it was done before because we knew that that wasn't working.

SPEAKER_01 26:20

It's not how you're going to be doing business going forward either. Exactly. Great. Okay, so um let's move on to think a bit more about visibility and influence in the industry because it's not just about transforming things at shire beds, but you're also you've been very mindful and intentional around making yourself visible within the industry. You've made a conscious choice to step into that wider industry, which has included chairing committees and making sure that you built relationships that built your visibility. Tell us more about what prompted that.

SPEAKER_00 26:53

So uh when I joined the business, you know, one of the things I was very concerned about was whether I would continue to grow as a person, whilst the day-to-day stuff can take on a kind of a routine. There isn't a great deal of additional learning that you can well, I felt at the time that there wasn't a great deal of gr growth that I would get from the business. So I started looking beyond the immediate business and I started looking at trade organizations and um you know the wider uh business around um you know bedding and sleep. So the National Bed Federation is the Industries Federation, and I got involved with them. Uh they do a show. So following the show, I started I got involved with the marketing committee. I very quickly began to chair that marketing committee. I then went on to the board of the National Bed Federation, and um, you know, my time on there is now moving on to leading the National Bed Federation as the president from May this year.

SPEAKER_01 27:56

That's fantastic, and congratulations on that. For women listening today who maybe feel like outsiders in their industry, what has helped you claim your space?

SPEAKER_00 28:06

I suppose it's it's just that sort of grit and determination to continue to to to learn, to feel that you belong, to continue to feel that you can actually make a difference, and to actually not feel that even if it doesn't look like you belong here and there are no people like you, and you know, like we talked about, we there have been rooms and spaces where there were no women when I first joined the you know the industry, that you still sort of find somewhere deep down, you know, that desire to carry on.

SPEAKER_01 28:37

Yes, and there's something about being being sure of your contribution, that you are there to make a contribution and making that what the centre ground rather than about your gender. Absolutely. And you talk about the sector has around 26% female um leaders at the moment. What do you think still needs to shift? Because that's still very below the 50-50 that we experience in the world as a whole. What do you still think needs to shift?

SPEAKER_00 29:05

Yeah, I mean, I think I think, you know, as in every career, you know, we we've got to have more role models that are visible. We've got to uh sort of make some of these places inviting. I think the industry has to change and realise that actually that is isn't an equal representation of women on boards and in places of influence, and therefore we need to make sure we create those. We've got to bring more people. It's an industry that doesn't particularly attract women as well. So, you know, it has to start at school where you know we have to make it attractive to females and you know young women as well. So it it's a sort of multi-pronged approach, really, where we you know sort of try it at every angle.

SPEAKER_01 29:42

Do you think your background in teaching and education could actually be helpful in making it more attractive to women in when they're when they're going through school?

SPEAKER_00 29:50

Yeah, I mean we we are you know we work with organisations that encourage women to join STEM careers as well, and that's through the work that I do with the West Yorkshire Combined Authority, and we have events that uh promote STEM learning to young people and particularly particularly girls as well. So, yeah, absolutely. We've got to actually work on young children and change their mindsets quite early on. Fantastic.

SPEAKER_01 30:12

And I mean, Faro, one of the reasons I asked you onto this podcast is you were a fantastic real model for not having to have one career, but you've you've now had two careers, and you're already talking of a third career as a career in writing. So you talk about wanting to write your parents' story. What feels important about that for you now?

SPEAKER_00 30:35

I'm very fortunate that we still have our parents, and the older you get, the the more you realise that they've had an incredible journey themselves in ways that perhaps you didn't value when you were younger. And I want to capture that not just for myself, but for my for further generations to come as well. It is a moment in history as well. I mean, you know, that experience of that generation of migrants from the 60s, I don't think has been captured properly. And so that I think there's a creative project that needs to be done that is just beyond my own parents' um story as well. But personally, I would love to be able to really capture that story and you know, just to just to write. I mean, I I was an English teacher, I taught English at it right up to A level, and part of English teaching is reading and uh writing, and so therefore, you know, most English teachers believe that they are writers and have a book in them. So I believe that there, you know, there are several books that I would like to write.

SPEAKER_01 31:35

So that's kind of the next steps for you beyond being MD of Shire Beds, you're going to become a writer. Hopefully. Hopefully, I've got a few things to do. And and and and the person who steps into your shoes as MD of Shire Beds, what would you hope that they continue of your legacy?

SPEAKER_00 31:54

Yeah, so I mean, whilst it's a family business, I didn't come into the business without having proved myself elsewhere. Uh and we have maintained that with our own children as well. You know, we have a business, it's a family business. However, our children have their own careers and they've got their own lives. Uh and if they were to come and join the business, they would have to bring something to the party, they would have to bring something to that would be valuable for it as well. So, and it might not just be my children, it might be, you know, extended members of the family. So, you know, that's one of the sort of succession options. But beyond that, you know, the succession that um that we have planned is that we have people in the organization who are talented to run it. And so we have set up systems and processes, which is you know my biggest objective now is to have systems and processes that run independent of who is running them. And we have managers who have got the talent to make sure that they run effectively. So you know, it's about taking that business to the next level now, you know, that it doesn't rely on individuals, you know, but it relies on us building the processes for it to be sustainable as a business long term.

SPEAKER_01 33:14

And how would you describe the culture of the business now?

SPEAKER_00 33:18

Well, I mean, it's moving to that more process-based culture. You know, we have uh manuals for things, we have, you know, SOP, standard operating procedures, we have teams, we have clear structures, organised, you know, we have uh things which are documented very, very clearly in terms of specifications and product um manufacture. All of that is all happening and and has happened, you know, in the last, I would say, last decade, uh, and that has made the organization quite strong. And and I suppose it's part of our success, you know, the fact that uh, you know, we did achieve the ISO 9001, which is all about processes and the the the kind of strength of those processes. Uh, and we just continue on that journey.

SPEAKER_01 34:02

And how does that support the inclusivity diversity piece which you're so passionate about?

SPEAKER_00 34:08

Well, it it means it means that you know it's not in people's heads, you know, the information is not retained by individuals, you know, it's not something that I have to go to an individual and then try and defrag, you know. But if it's written down in a process, then if the person is talented and if the person has those skills, it doesn't matter whether it's a man or a woman or whatever, you know, background, then you know, as long as they've got the skills, they should be able to pick up that job. So, you know, it would create a much more equal playing field for people when we're appointing them. And so we're coming to the end of our conversation.

SPEAKER_01 34:42

So I've got a couple more questions to ask just before we close completely. So looking back on your career, what do you think uh your younger self, the one who trained to be a teacher, would say if they saw you now?

SPEAKER_00 34:56

You know, when you start out in a career, you almost sort of do a lot of pretend, don't you, that you know, you you when you first qualify, you kind of think, right, okay, I've qualified as a teacher, but now I have to really pretend to be a teacher. And I suppose the same thing when I moved into business, I had to pretend to be a businesswoman, you know, sort of taught like I was a businesswoman. I don't have to do that anymore. And and I think perhaps I need to say to my younger self, you know, you don't need to pretend because eventually you will be, you will be a great teacher and you will be, you know, a successful businesswoman. Uh yeah. So I what I want to say to myself, what I want to believe now is that yes, one day I will be a great writer as well. Oh, fantastic. I love that.

SPEAKER_01 35:38

So you can talk to your future self about your writing. And what is one lesson you've learned about being a woman in leadership that you wish more people understood?

SPEAKER_00 35:47

Well, it's that old age old, isn't it? Don't let other people define you. You know, don't uh uh let other people's view of you uh affect your view of yourself. You know, just believe in yourself and try and cut that out because there will be views from other people that you as women we feel quite subtly, but you know, don't dwell on those, you know, just carry on with your belief and your direction of travel.

SPEAKER_01 36:14

Yes. Thank you so much, Farah. Your wisdom is coming out in spades today, and really, really appreciate you sharing it with us. And you are the most amazing real model of how you can have a squiggly career. You start with one career but you end up with another, and you've got a third one coming up round the corner as well for you. But what a great stand you are for enabling gender equity in the workplace as well. Thank you. Thank you.

unknown 36:39

Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 36:40

Thank you so much for listening to the She Leads Collective podcast. If this episode resonated with you, follow the show or share it with a friend and leave a quick review below. Or leave us a comment. Change happens through conversation, so let's keep this one going. Listen out for the next episode and join me as we keep lifting the lid on the stories that matter. Take care and keep leading with heart.