CAHM scents and defibrilators: How the University of Leeds Help to Grow: Management course is supporting entrepreneurs

But when the Covid pandemic struck, she took the opportunity to reassess her life, give up her corporate career and find a path that made her happy.

She turned to the Help to Grow: Management course at the University of Leeds to aid the development of her fragrance and wellbeing products, which are now stocked in high-end retail centres from the Orkney Islands to Cornwall.

Amy is among the latest of 250 small and medium-sized enterprises that have been helped on their journey by the Government-funded course at the university over the past two-and-a-half years.

The University of Leeds graduate gravitated back to the city after completing a degree in Human Geography in 2009.

Following university, she travelled around Tanzania, Uganda and Kenya helping to build primary schools, and later got a job at The Savoy Hotel in London due to her customer service skills.

These were honed from her younger days being around the family business – a furniture firm in Whitby which ran for over 200 years, and also working every summer in seaside hospitality.

She said: “My job with the Savoy was amazing. It was the hardest job I have ever done. It was a challenge dealing with the public and managing their expectations, but also very enjoyable.”

Amy was part of the re-opening team following a £260 million, three-year refurbishment and recalls asking The Rolling Stones to take their trainers off.

“They were actually very polite and changed their trainers,” she says.

She also got stuck in an antique lift for half-an-hour with the rock band Kings of Leon as she was taking them to their room. “The job certainly taught me how to deal with people,” she said.

When the Covid pandemic hit, she was furloughed.

Amy started making candles, and decided it could be a business. This was the start of her brand CAHM – incorporating her initials – which has products including candles, diffusers, hand and body washes and lotions.

“I developed severe anxiety in 2020 and I needed to do something for myself,” said Amy. “This business is all about sharing a positive mental health message through beautiful design-led gifts. We try to bring a moment of calm into people’s lives and all our products have a CAHM life mantra.”

She was encouraged to sign up for the Help to Grow management course by someone she met at a networking event.

“When I first looked at the course, I felt I wasn’t a big enough business, but I was persuaded to still sign up and it is the best thing I have ever done for the brand. It has given me focus and a renewed motivation for what we are doing. It has made me realise that having the right mindset is crucial to success. It is 95 per cent of everything. There are lots of things you think you can’t do – but actually you can.”

She has even created a personalised fragrance for the university-owned Cloth Hall Court.

Elsewhere, lifelong friends Jonathan Gilbert and Joe Lawrence also found the Help to Grow management course hugely beneficial in developing a business that now turns over £2.2m a year.

Their aim is to make it more affordable for organisations to have a defibrillator on site. Rather than taking on the cost of buying and maintaining a machine, organisations can rent new equipment from Defib Machines for £1 a day.

Jonathan came up with the idea when he noticed a yellow box on a wall while on holiday in Italy. After getting the words translated, he discovered it was a fully automated device that people could take off the wall and use to give a shock to someone suffering from cardiac arrest.

He was interested, having trained as a first aider during his years taking part in martial arts, and soon realised what a difference it made to survival rates for cardiac arrest victims.

Jonathan, who originally studied marketing at Newcastle University, said: “I discovered that having a shock with a defibrillator within the first five minutes of having had a cardiac arrest boosted the chances of surviving from under five per cent to over 80 per cent. That really amazed me.”

A school in Cheshire became his first customer in January 2016 and now he has more than 5,000 customers nationwide. In 2022 Jonathan needed a finance director and knew exactly who to call – he had known Joe since he was a few years old, both went to Bradford Grammar School and the same university.

Jonathan said: “It was perfect timing as he had just passed all his accountancy exams. He is the smartest person I know and he wanted to come back to Yorkshire after working in Buckinghamshire, so it was a really great fit.”

The headquarters of Defib Machines is in Wellington Street, Leeds, and credit the university’s course with giving them the chance to sustain the company’s growth.

Joe says: "We had individual mentors and that was extremely helpful. Mine was Steve Baker. He didn’t tell you what to do – he guided you. He wasn’t at all prescriptive. He was always constructive and helpful which meant although there were challenges on the course, there were never any disagreements. He taught me the value of ‘simple threads’ – that is, don’t complicate stuff.”

When Jonathan and Joe finished the course in 2023, they put together a five-year programme to achieve their goals and develop their employees. Jonathan said: “Putting together that plan allowed us to accelerate the growth of the company. The more defibs that are out there, the more chance there is of people being saved.”