Meet the Sheffield CEO who owns one of Britain's fastest growing businesses making steel products for Army tanks and wind turbines

"I saw an opportunity to do things better and even simple things like letting a customers know if there was going to be a delay. I'd not seen that level of service provided before."

She adds: "There's a complacency in ageing businesses and there's not really a desire to change, which has led to a lot of success for ourselves."

Rather than having to break down legacy cultures, Parkinson, who was recognised in the 2024 Telegraph & Natwest 100 Female Entrepreneurs to Watch, was able to create a new culture from scratch and says she is working hard to maintain that as the business grows.

International Energy Products, a Sheffield-based steel stockholder and processor of specialist alloys that was established in 2018, has grown into a group comprising five companies.

The business, which has total turnover of almost £10m, employs 28 people across its Sheffield and Chesterfield sites.

It provides metal components, including valves, for sectors including renewable energy, nuclear, defence, petrochemical and marine and its products help to make a wide variety of vehicles and structures from Army tanks to wind turbines.

The business is ranked 37th in The Sunday Times 100, Britain’s fastest-growing private companies 2024.

Up to 70 per cent of the International Energy Products’s work is shipped overseas to the Middle East, America, Asia and Europe. Parkinson is also an export champion for the Department for Business and Trade.

It's a long way from the Sheffield-born teenager who had planned to study law at Durham University with the intention of becoming a barrister but then panicked and decided to stay at home.

"My mum's very down-to-earth and said if I wasn't going to university then I needed to get out in the real world and find a job," says Parkinson.

"It's incredibly hard when you've got no experience at all. I remember sending a million CVs out for very low skilled admin jobs."

She adds: "I landed myself a position in recruitment, which I'm very grateful for because that sector taught me a lot. You're almost like your own business operating within a larger entity.

"It taught me everything I know today from sales operations through to accounts and finance, having to engage with lots of different people from all backgrounds and walks of life so it really set me up for the future."

Parkinson, now 36, was headhunted by a large national steel stockholder she worked with at the recruitment firm. Although she lacked engineering knowledge at that point, she started at the bottom and worked her way up.

"Every time there was an opportunity to progress I took it and worked really hard to generate results,” she says.

"I reached my ceiling when I was branch manager for multiple sites and I didn’t really see a future with that business moving forward.”

Parkinson decided to take a huge leap of faith and established her own rival business with £100,000 investment from her husband’s boss and a secondhand bandsaw.

"In the employed opportunity I’d gained a wealth of experience and felt confident that I could do it for myself,” she says.

However, she admits it was tough at first. “In the very early stages I’d launched the brand to market and I was sitting in an office on my own thinking what the hell have I done?

"But it only took me two weeks to catch the first significant order. I knew it was enough to see us over the next 12 months and I started to relax at that point.”

For the first nine months Parkinson worked alone – doing every job within the business. The bandsaw she bought to cut the steel turned out to be the most complex type of machine on the market so she had to ask contacts within the industry to teach her how to operate it.

"It was a huge learning curve in lots of aspects but I look back on those days very fondly now because I love nothing more than to get stuck in,” she says. “It was also a little bit of therapy for me but it was definitely a testing time.”

Being a female entrepreneur in a male-dominated environment came with its own set of challenges but Parkinson says ‘being northern’ helped. “It gave me the confidence that I needed to be resilient in that industry,” she says.

"It’s unfortunate that the sector still isn’t a place for everybody, even at this stage. It can be tough and there’s still discrimination out there but I’ve never allowed myself to be beaten down by some of the comments that I face. I’ve risen above it and got on with the job."

She adds: “My advice would be to make sure you know your product and your business because people will try and test that."

Looking ahead, Parkinson is keen to expand the group’s international footprint

"I'm so unbelievably ambitious,” she says. “I’m never quite happy with what I’ve got. We’re actively investigating the opportunity to open a factory abroad.”

The group is looking to invest £4m to reach £19m turnover in the next 12 months and £25m turnover in the next two years.

The main challenges for the business at the moment are the global political and economic uncertainties. “The difficult thing is trying to navigate what that world’s going to look like moving forward,” she says.

She adds: “But the world has been uncertain for a while now and it’s made me really resilient.

"For anyone wanting to be successful in business, it’s about being resilient to problem solving every day. You have to enjoy that part of business because the more successful you become, the more problems you get.”