Bold As Brass

The book I read to research this post was Bold As Brass by Hilary Devey which is an excellent book which I bought from Kindle. This book is Hilary Devey's autobiography & was number one on the business & finance book chart on kindle quite recently. In case you're wondering who she is in britain we have a tv programme called Dragons Den where would be entrepreneurs put their ideas for a business to a panel of business people of which one is Hilary & if they like the idea they will offer to help finance it in exchange for a portion of the profits. Believe me they are pretty tough business people & apparently Hilary has business interest with an annual turnover of more than £100 million. She has also been on 2 tv programmes called The Business Inspector & The Secret Millionaire. Apparently her parents were quite poor. Her dad has his own business which went bankrupt because a major customer owed him a lot of money. Their house got repossessed along with most of their possessions. They had to move in with her grandmother who disliked Hilary. She joined the WRAF at one stage & when she left that she found it difficult to adjust to normal life. She worked in several jobs where she was supervising, training & motivating sales teams and seemed to be in her element. After that she went into business on her own. She had a son who was dyslexic and later became a heroin addict & also she had a bit of trouble with her partners so she has had it quite tough. One amusing case in the book was about a man who was a human cannonball in a circus & went on Dragon's Den to get funding for a new cannon & she said she'd be terrified of investing in that because she would have to phone his wife up every time he did a performance to make sure he was still alive.