How becoming a startup expert enabled Sussanne Chambers to found HomeXperts

Having some serious entrepreneurial credentials may have helped, but this franchisor says her parents had the most influence on her professional trajectory

How becoming a startup expert enabled Sussanne Chambers to found HomeXperts

Shaping startups during the height of the dotcom boom and building brands for FTSE 250 firms certainly gave Sussanne Chambers the experience she needed to grow HomeXperts into an award-winning estate and lettings franchise. But in her mind, there’s no doubt that her parents played the most significant role setting her on that path. Her father in particular proved to be a real source of inspiration: the recipient of a Queen’s Award for Technical Innovation, he invented both the first piece of microelectronics to be installed in a car and the first pacemaker implant, which forms the basis of the model still used to this day. “My father taught me I could achieve whatever I wanted in life,” Chambers says. “He always encouraged me to strive and to really believe in myself.”

Despite this, as a child Chambers wasn’t particularly enamoured of the academic life, something in no small part down to the abolition of the grammar school system the year before she was due to begin high school. “Because of the new system, I couldn’t go to the school I wanted to attend,” she says. Instead Chambers threw herself into the world of work: she held three paper rounds up until she left school at 16, at which point she moved into retail, coming to carry out the marketing for two independent stores.

But it was when she entered the newspaper industry that she really found her niche. “For the first time, I was part of a high-performing team working with like-minded people,” she says. “I loved creating something new, seeing my work in print every week.” Working her way up through the ranks of a local news organisation, she soon helped launch a new title covering Dudley in the west Midlands before stepping up to become group marketing manager and overseeing 16 titles. “From there, I moved to a national brand, started working on trade titles and eventually became the youngest publisher within my sector,” she says.

A significant change in direction came for Chambers after the business she founded to provide synchronised editorial to free TV magazines merged with the Press Association. “I was headhunted for a sales director role at a young, fast-growing insurance company,” says Chambers. When the business was subsequently acquired by the FTSE 250 insurance provider Helphire in 1997, Chambers was tasked with setting up a new sales team for Angel Assistance, one of its insurance products. “I learnt so much while working there,” she says. “Even though the company was growing so fast, it became clear culture and atmosphere really was key in getting the most out of the team.”

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<p>But Chambers wasn’t only learning on the job: overcoming her previous distaste for academia, she began studying for her business and finance HND in the evenings after work before going on to do a full degree. Never one to do things by half measures, during her final year she also decided to study for an Institute of Marketing diploma. “It was quite challenging,” she says. “While I was attending university three nights a week and studying for my diploma, I was pregnant with my first child.” Having only a brief respite to give birth to her son, Chambers was soon back to the books but thankfully all that hard work paid off when she passed her assessments with flying colours. “I loved it: I actually won the national award for the best strategic exam from the Chartered Institute or Marketing,” she says.</p>
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<p>Clearly picking up on this indefatigable spirit, in 2000 Goal PLC, a scrappy e-learning enterprise, sought her out to help build its sales and customer-support team prior to its floatation on AIM that April. “By that time, I’d established myself as a startup specialist,” she says. “It was brilliant fun: setting up the company, starting from a single sheet of paper.”</p>
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<p>However, while building a tech-based business at the height of the dotcom boom was an exciting journey, getting people living in the era of dialup modems to see how tuition could be integrated with tech wasn’t easy. “It was challenging getting people to understand the online offering and how it would really benefit the education of children,” Chambers says. “Today it’s a model that we just take for granted.”</p>
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<p>Having helped grow her team at Goal PLC to 35 employees, a break from the frenetic pace of startup life came when Chambers’ husband was offered a job on the Hawaiian island of Maui. “It was a really lovely: my four-year-old son and I had such fun playing on the beach each day,” she says. Initially, Chambers had planned to stay home with her son on their return to the UK but she saw a vacancy for a sales director just up the road at BizzEnergy, the independent energy supplier. Given many of her previous roles had involved a long commute to places like Bristol, Bath or London, she knew she couldn’t pass up the chance of a job closer to her family and applied. “Instead of getting the director of sales job, they offered me director of marketing and asked me to create a new brand for the company,” she says.</p>
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<p>Over the course of the next seven years, Chambers helped grow BizzEnergy from a startup to a business with a turnover of over £180m, which she feels was an invaluable experience. “I was really lucky to be working with an energetic, exciting, high-performing board that had a real can-do attitude,” she says. “They empowered me to make decisions and live with the consequences of the choices I made.” Without a doubt, Chambers believes that helping to grow these kinds of businesses imparted many of the skills she would need to eventually build one of her own, in part because working at a startup encourages people to become generalists. “There’s rarely a cluster of staff to help you in the early days, so frequently if you want a job doing you just have to roll up your sleeves and do it yourself,” she says.</p>
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Josh Russell
Josh Russell
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