Hi, I’m Karen Skidmore and I’m one of the UK’s most sought after business coaches and mentors. I specialise in freedom based business models and creating marketing systems that allow leads to easily and simply flow in to your business.

I’ve created a business model for myself that brings in only the very best clients for me to work with during term times only. And this is my idea of freedom.

If you can’t have freedom when you are your own boss, what’s the point of it all … right?

I decided that, as I had taken the plunge to jump off the corporate ladder back in 2004 to spend more of my time to be “Mum” as my children started school, there was no point working all day and all night if I couldn’t create the time to enjoy life.

There’s nothing fun about working ridiculous hours only to end up creating a hobby business that gives you just enough income to sneak under the inland revenue threshold, is there?!

And as I was after creating a decent income, if I had no time to enjoy the fruits of my labour, I knew I was in danger of getting burnt out. And no one wants to get ill when they have a business to run!

Me in my earlier “Kick Ass” days

I left corporate life in 2004, when I originally begun my entrepreneurial journey as a life coach. Yup .. hard to believe if you’ve ever met me. However, after just a few months, this journey almost ended as quickly as it begun. Selling myself by the hour as a women’s confidence coach didn’t really take off!

Instead of begging for my old job back, I began to discover what it really meant to be a business owner. My journey (fortunately!) took a whole different path.

After several years of running my hugely successful “Women’s Enterprise Programme”, with European Social Funds awarded from University of Surrey and recognised as a business support advisor by Business Link, I began to teach email marketing and blogging courses.

Social media naturally followed and in 2010, I launched The Web Tech Club which became the go-to resource for small business owners looking to find out how to use web based marketing tools. I wrote and published my book “Shiny Shiny: How to Stop Being a Social Media Magpie”.

After working hard (far too hard at times!) for much of my first 10 years in business, I realised that as I became one of those proverbial “woman-of-a-certain-age”, I needed to change the way I worked and made some serious changes to my business model; simplifying many of my marketing strategies and closing down several of my products (my hugely successful membership site, The Web Tech Club being one of them).,

Today, I focus my time and energy working with clients on my 2 core programmes: The GID School for start ups and business owners looking to get new clients fast and The Academy for experts growing their business, wanting to leverage their time and create a True Profit business model.

In my “spare time”, I’m also married with two teenage children and a dog to keep to keep me company when I work from home.