Designer, creator, mother and business founder. This week’s #WCW is the creator of So…Visualise Lisa Borrie.
In a small village in North Yorkshire you’ll find Lisa, working part-time to fund and create her first start up. So…Visualise create visual displays for creative industries, they’ve worked with Hollyoaks, wedding magazines, Lime Pictures and had enquires from Red Bull. After starting off working within weddings, helping couples visualise and design their weddings they went wider and now focus on business to business relationships.
“So…Visualise has been up and running for about a year and it’s pedalling hard, I’ve changed the name a bit, but we are now more business to business which has been our focus in the last year, we have a lot of connections in London and other prop companies who we will collaborate with in the future.”
In it’s first year the company had a turnover of between £15,000 and £20,000, a lot of this is due to Lisa growing and changing the company to adapt to new clients “we need to change and grow customers to enhance our business to business relationship. I am looking for that work-life balance as I want to enjoy time with my family and not work all the time.”
Being based away from London means she has managed to create her own female business network, based off a similar group she met in London called Queen Bees, where she met Rosie Davies her current mentor. The group includes females from all aspects of the creative field. “. It includes photographers and designers and we all support each other. It’s great having someone closer to home, you can talk to friends and family but they don’t know as much as fellow business women. It’s great to have that connection with a smaller group locally, I feel very blessed and it’s going really well.”
Lisa runs the business single handed, with the help of her own ambition, determination and drive. Something she encourages other women to find and use, “put as many hours in as you can, enjoy what you do, don’t do it for the money, don’t look for big pots of money from investors and finance, don’t look for that, if it’s meant to happen it’ll happen. It’ll grow with you putting time into it, even if you’re doing it part-time it’s amazing how much you can do.”
So…Visualise have applied for the Virgin Business start up loan, and hope to use this funds to grow the business even more.
Words: Amy Jo Taylor
