With a surname like hers, it was perhaps inevitable that Chrissie Twigg would end up running a weight-loss business.
“I do get teased about that,” she said. Twigg, the middle of three children, was born in Wakefield, Yorkshire, where both her parents were teachers. After school she studied history at London University. A variety of jobs followed until she ended up in the export department of Pan Books.
“It was a tremendously exciting and vibrant place to be,” said Twigg. “But that was when I realised there were all these women in publishing but it was the men who were running the company. I thought if I am ever going to run anything I need to find out a bit more about business.”
So she did an MBA at Warwick University and, despite having intended to go back to publishing, ended up working as an investment analyst in the City.
After two years she married and moved to Birmingham, where she worked as a business manager in the Priory hospital. While there she met her second husband, David, a cardiovascular epidemiologist, and that was when the idea for her business was born.
David was interested in the relationship between weight and cardiovascular disease and it was while talking to him about his job that Twigg realised there was a gap in the market for a weight-loss programme for obese people.
“At the time there was not much provision for obese people in this country,” she said. “There was a lack of understanding among the medical profession and it was not treated as a separate speciality. I thought this is something I am really interested in. I can do something about this.”
Twigg decided to start a service to help obese people lose weight. She spent a year researching existing business models across Europe and then launched the business in 2003 at the age of 44 with £30,000 of savings.
She rented some rooms in the Priory hospital to run the business and put together a 10-week programme that combined weight loss, a low-calorie diet, physical activity and behavioural therapy. She marketed the course, which cost £400 to join, by advertising in the local paper and holding open evenings.
With the help of her husband she also developed a range of nutritional products to go with the programme.
It was then that Twigg made the decision that nearly derailed the business. She decided to form a joint-venture partnership with a big company in the healthcare sector in an effort to grow the business. With hindsight it was a big mistake.
“I would go to these board meetings with 12 men round the table and it would be just like a firing squad. I was just too scared to say anything and it always felt very unfriendly,” she said.
“It was a complete disaster because they had no understanding of how to get a small business growing.
“It was a total mismatch of a very large company trying to work with a very small company and not appreciating that sometimes you can’t force things to grow at a frantic pace.”
Twigg persevered with the partnership for a year until, at the end of 2004, the large company suddenly told her it wanted to end the arrangement.
She said: “I was left with absolutely nothing, with a business that was on its knees going nowhere.”
With the big partner gone, Twigg was left with a stark choice. “I could either go back and get a job with another company or I could really try again and make this succeed,” she said. “I just thought, damn it, we have come so far. We are providing a service here that is needed, so let’s start again. So that is what I did.”
By this point, however, she had already spent all her £30,000 start-up money. Fortunately she found two investors through friends of friends who were prepared to invest £150,000 in the business in return for a minority stake.
Gradually her weight-loss programme began to attract more clients and she opened another two centres in London and Manchester.
In 2005 she started to offer a wide range of obesity surgery as well as the weight-loss programme and the business really started to take off. As a result, turnover this year is expected to be £3.5m.
Now aged 50 and married with three children, Twigg offers this advice: “If you want a risk-averse job you will always work for somebody else. If you want to be an entrepreneur, you have to take risks.
“The second thing is that intelligent women often lack confidence. That was my fatal mistake when I started.”
She is clear about the secret of her success: “Even though I am quite a sensitive person I have a core of steel. I knew I had a good idea and it was just a sheer, unrelenting determination to succeed. I didn’t want to let it go.
“I think the other thing to remember is that you don’t have to be a rottweiler to succeed in business. Those great traditional values of fairness, tolerance and fraternity are the principles by which I try to run this company.”
Rachel Bridge
The Sunday Times & Times online
Photograph by Richard Stanton
May 2009
