My story
From Saturday girl to sales trainer
I didn't start out thinking I'd create a sales training method. I simply wanted to work, learn and prove I could do a good job. Here's the road that turned those years into a method.
- 14 · Saturday girl in a hair salon. My first job nearly broke my confidence — some days I went home in tears. It taught me how much the right environment matters, and how quickly harsh ones make people doubt strengths they already had.
- 17 · Supervisor and key holder. I qualified in beauty therapy and Level 2 makeup, tried salon life once more, then moved into fashion retail — where, still only 17, I was promoted to supervisor and key holder in a million-pound store. Maybe I wasn't the problem. Maybe I just hadn't found the right environment yet.
- 18 · Beauty counter manager. Six months into cosmetics I was managing a counter and two members of staff — and building my own self-employed makeup business, Charlie's Beauty Secrets, where the conversation mattered as much as the finished look.
- Then · Luxury cosmetics manager. Counter, team, targets and events for a well-known luxury brand inside a major department store. When management pushed me out, I learned to back myself — and to lead in a way that never took away someone's confidence.
- 25 · My own business. I built an online business that grew to around 80 people. It became extremely successful — then closed when the growth it needed needed investment I didn't have. So I started again. Starting again isn't glamorous, but it teaches you what's real.
- The proof · Same person, different counter. Back on a luxury cosmetics counter a couple of days a week, I sold around £200 of products in my 20-minute interview and won an internal mascara sales challenge within weeks. Not pressure — noticing, asking, remembering, explaining. On event days I'd be at the front of the counter for thousands of pounds in sales, and I was never thinking “how much can I make this person spend?” I was thinking: who is this person, and what do they need?
- 27 · I lost my dad. Nothing in my career had prepared me for that kind of pain. Targets, promotions and politics suddenly felt very small. Loss also changed my relationship with fear: a no still matters, but it doesn't define your worth.
- Now · The dog-food ambassador. I came back to what I'd always understood — people, relationships and sales — as an ambassador for a dog food brand. Same conversation, completely different product. That's when I stopped calling it an industry trick and named it a method: CHAR.
Nearly two decades taught me one lesson again and again: stop seeing the customer as a transaction. Start seeing the person. That is why I do what I do — and it is exactly how I'll talk to you about your dog's food.