How Mel Hird got to the top of the finance industry on her own terms

Co-founder of Fresh Thinking Capital, Mel has spent a quarter of a century working in corporate finance and advice, despite being only 42.

Centred around providing capital and finance to the SME market in Yorkshire and beyond, Fresh Thinking is now seeking to expand to bring in an advisory element to its portfolio.

For me, it’s a pretty simple product,” says Mel.

“We have got money and we require security.

“It’s about the integrity of the business owners, we look into the whites of their eyes and into their business proposition. Then it is a case of do we believe we can work with them, is the chemistry there? We can lend in as quickly as five days.

Fresh Thinking only came to market in 2018.

It is backed by Foresight Group as an institutional investor, an incredible feat given the size of the firm and testimony to the offering it has.

It is the latest chapter for Mel in a storied career that has seen her make her mark as one of the most respected operators in her field.

Right back to her childhood she was highly motivated.

Aged just 17 she joined what was then still called Ernst & Young (EY in today’s money) as a school leaver.

She went straight into the restructuring team and quickly found her feet, working under the great Hunter Kelly, who is due to retire this year.

“It was very unusual at the time,” she says.

“Typically they recruited graduates. I was one of only two (school leavers) across the country.

“I worked there for six years. And because I was a school leaver there was no set pattern. The graduate training programme was pretty straight forward. You came in and did your exams and that was it. Whereas for us two as school leavers there was an element of ‘what do we do with them?’. But we worked hard and because of that the harder we worked the more we got on because of the experience we had.

“I was doing the same exams as the graduates but by the time they had qualified I had three years more experience than them.

“It was fantastic. Because it was a small team I would get involved in the restructuring of a business from £1m right through to £250m turnover.

“It was a phenomenal experience.”

Despite being some time ago, the impact Hunter had on Mel is palpable.

“He was fantastic at making sure any documents that went out of his office were perfect,” she says.

“It taught me the importance of the integrity of what you send out of that door. There are no reasons for any shortcomings, we are only as good as our last deal.

“A lot of that goes back to my Hunter days.”

She would eventually move on to join Kroll as a senior manager. At the time Mel was the youngest insolvency practitioner in the UK. She was one of the youngest managers across Leeds and by the age of 27 she had been in the business for 10 years. The work at Kroll involved a lot of London work and she spent nine months in Sweden. It was here that her ambitions as an entrepreneur began to surface.

She says: “I had a lot of high net worth individuals buying retail business so I had a following of local business people who had money who said why don’t you go it alone? ‘You have a network, go for it’ they would say.

“I went on what was meant to be a nine-month secondment to HSBC but ended up doing 18 months. It was the first time in my life I had worked 9am-5pm. Previously I worked intensely on projects until they were concluded.

“9-5 gave me thinking time. The bits I always liked about the business was the management teams, actually getting under the skin of the business and finding out what the problems were.

“I thought to myself, if we can get a hold of some of these management teams, they can do what they are good at sector specific wise and we will do our best at what we are good at: corporate Government and raising finance. It means we can make a real difference.

“So I took the plunge and left to set up my own business, Frontline Investments. It was a suck it and see exercise. We invested in nine businesses. The maximum we ever put in was £1.32m and we made a £10m return on the capital. That was really a case of rolling our sleeves up and turning them around.”

Working as a female business leader in a sector dominated by men of course presented challenges but Mel had a clear approach.

“It is a question that rears its head a lot as there are not a lot of female people in this space. In my early years I felt I had to work a lot harder to prove myself. I wanted to be respected because I was good at my job, not because I was female. I was at a roundtable event a couple of weeks ago and it was all men.

“People who know me in this marketplace respect my work. I am pleased about that.”

Now running Fresh Thinking alongside its fellow co-founder Andrew Walls, Mel has reached a key point in her career.

“Ambition and motivation is my DNA,” she says.

“I look at my business now and think I am empowering the younger generation to do what I did in days gone by. If I leave a legacy to them then it’s that, guys you can be anything you want to.”