From the hospitality floor to the honours list

Alison’s journey

But that’s not where it began…

1. 1967

   Alison Edgar grew up in a high-rise council flat in Clydebank, Scotland, raised by her parents Alistair and Jessie, a shipyard worker and a cleaner. She feels blessed for what they lacked in money, they made up for with love.

   

2. 1979–1984

   School and Alison didn’t get on

   School was hard, and nobody could work out why. She put the effort in and she still couldn’t read, write or hold on to information the way everyone else seemed to. We’d call it dyslexia now. Back then she was just the girl who wasn’t very bright, and when you hear that often enough you start believing it. She left with no qualifications and not much self-worth to go with them.

   Being underestimated as a child teaches you a great lesson. If the system won’t make room for you, you make your own luck. And you get good at the things you’re good at, instead of apologising for the things you’re not.

   

3. 1984

   Hospitality was her university

   Her real education started at 16, in a small family run hotel.

   If you want to understand how a business actually works, hospitality is a great place to launch from. Everything happens in real time, there’s nowhere to hide and you’re not stuck in a department. One day she was on the front line with customers, the next she was doing the ordering, the rota, the cashing up, chasing a supplier who’d let them down. She saw the whole thing, end to end.

   

4. 1987

   Hospitality also took her round the world, working for brands like Radisson in Sydney and Southern Sun in Cape Town and gave her her first glimpse into the challenges and successes of leadership.

   

5. 1993

   On returning to Scotland she entered another career which welcomed neurodiversity, sales. She was good at it. Really good. Top performer everywhere she went.

   She discovered, selling isn’t talking, it’s listening. It’s working out what somebody actually needs, which is rarely what they said in the first sentence. Hospitality had been drilling that into her for years.

   She learned to apply the same principles to leadership style, listening properly to understand to give clarity in real time high pressure business situations.

   

6. 1998

   Change on the way up

   Then came the Yellow Pages, back when it was a giant monopoly and the only place to turn before we had the world at our fingertips on our phones. Alison had a front-row seat for one of the great corporate cautionary tales. The internet was on its way; everyone could see it coming. She was in the room when the CEO said, “This Google thing will never catch on.” We all know how that ended. The share price fell off a cliff, and a brand people had grown up with collapsed.

   It stayed with her, and not because of the job. It was what the whole thing proved. Yellow Pages was full of talented people. What finished them off was a lack of psychological safety, all inside a culture where nobody further down the ladder had the room to force a change while there was still time.

   The lesson she took wasn’t to walk away — it was the opposite. It’s why she now helps organisations build what Yellow Pages never had: a culture where people at every level have the safety, and the ownership, to drive change from the inside while there’s still time.

   

7. 2011

   Going it alone

   Alison had spent years selling advertising to small businesses, watching how many of them never made it — Forbes reckons 90% of start-ups fail. She knew she could change that.

   So she backed herself and built a company from scratch — around the school run and caring for her two disabled parents — doing for other founders what she’d wished someone had done for her: helping them grow, and talking them into believing they had every right to be in the room. She was instrumental in the growth of major organisations, from zero to multi-million-pound turnovers, and the people she helped started calling her “The Entrepreneur’s Godmother”.

   

8. 2015

   A voice for enterprise

   As her reputation grew, so did the recognition. The government brought her in to help shape its review of self-employment, and in 2015 she was invited to the Queen’s Garden Party at Buckingham Palace — nominated for her work supporting enterprise across the UK.

   

9. 2018

   Pushing through for purpose

   Writing and narrating her first book, Secrets of Successful Sales, was Alison’s version of climbing Mount Everest. From believing she couldn’t write a paragraph, to a book later voted one of the top business books written by a woman — a summit neither Alison nor the education system ever thought she would reach.

   

10. 2020

    It was an honour

    The word about her work got about. She was invited into Number 10 more than once, became a familiar face on the BBC, and spent a lot of time advising businesses around the country. In 2020 it was made official: an MBE, for services to entrepreneurship and business.

    

11. 2021

    SMASH IT!

    Three years later came her second, SMASH IT! The Art of Getting What YOU Want — an Amazon international bestseller and a WH Smith Top 10. Two bestsellers now: her double Olympic Gold.

    

12. 2023

    On the TEDx stage

    Alison takes to the TEDx stage with How to Change Before It’s Too Late — the very lesson she first watched play out at Yellow Pages, now shared with the world.

    

13. 2024

    Isn’t it ironic

    In 2024, Alison achieved an accolade she could never have imagined. From the girl who struggled with the school system from an early age she was given her Doctorate (honoris causa) for education.