Nice Article in the Northern Echo this week about our MD Nickie!
Force of nature: Nickie Gott
As the founder of events company She's Gott It, Nickie Gott brings passion and creativity to all she does - yet this belies a struggle for self-esteem and the strain of having to cope with cancer. Sarah Foster meets her
WHEN asked to describe her company, She’s Gott It, Nickie Gott has a favourite analogy. She says it applies equally to herself. “If we were to describe our team as an animal, we would be a zebra – unique, charming, synergic and strong,” she says. “What we do stands out and it can’t go unnoticed.”
Nickie is like a force of nature, dressing up as an elf to delight children at a Christmas extravaganza and organising picnics and fun challenges for her staff. It is immediately apparent that she perfectly suited to her job, devising and executing everything from community celebrations to corporate awards ceremonies – yet she isn’t the hard-nosed businesswoman you might expect. In fact, her professional image masks a tumultuous journey to success.
If anyone had said to Nickie, 49, as a teenager that she would end up running her own company, she would never have believed it. Despite a creative flair which permeates everything she does – including her hobby of cake decorating – she didn’t fit into the school system, and left without a single qualification. When, at 17, she moved back to the UK from Malta, where she had lived since she was 12, her mother insisted that she went to night school, and it was there that she met husband Ian. Nickie went on to get a job in sales “because it gave me a company car and good money”, and ended up working for an American greetings cards company.
She was delighted to discover she was pregnant, and, in typical style, prepared a special dinner where she presented Ian with a pair of bootees with the message, “See you in nine months, Daddy”. However, three months into the pregnancy, she was made redundant, and found herself preparing for the birth of her daughter Francesca on a shoestring budget. When, 16 months later, she became pregnant with her son Harry, she shared the news in a different way. “I hung a bottle which hit Ian in the face,” Nickie laughs. “It wasn’t the most ideal timing, given that we were financially struggling.”
Shortly after Harry’s arrival, all financial worries were eclipsed by concern over his health. He was diagnosed as having chronic asthma, which he eventually outgrew, but his first four years were traumatic for Nickie. “There were a couple of occasions where we weren’t sure he would pull through,” she recalls. “That takes it out of you. I had no qualifications, no job, I had nursed an ill child I was pretty low and extremely overweight – I was a size 24 and about 18 stone. I was very down, very depressed, and I didn’t know what I wanted to do in life. I was coming up to 30 and I was just kind of lost.”
Nickie was running a toddler group where she lived at Great Lumley, near Chester-le-Street, and found that funding was available for a play area. She threw herself into the task of securing this and when someone said she was good at fundraising, something clicked.
“It was kind of a light bulb moment,” she says. “I realised that the only person stopping me was me, and I think you have to reach that point because you blame everybody. I put myself on a performance coaching course and I wrote to every local authority and said, ‘I’m really good at organising events. Can I come and do it for you?’.”
Nickie ended up as marketing and events manager for Sedgefield Borough Council. As part of her performance coaching course, she had set herself five targets to achieve within ten years. She achieved them in five.
“I wanted to earn enough money to take my children on two holidays a year, I wanted a nice car – because I didn’t have one, so I wanted a convertible – I wanted to lose eight stone in weight, I wanted to have my own business doing something I loved, and I wanted to feel proud of myself,” says Nickie.
Having always planned to branch out alone, she used the experience she had gained to go freelance. Organising events, initially, from her garage at Woodstone Village, near Houghton-le-Spring, Nickie established She’s Gott It in 2002. It wasn’t long before she outgrew the makeshift office.
“I was away. I was off,” she recalls. “Within a year, my mum was having to come and help me at the kitchen table and my sister was having to come and help me at the dining table. We outgrew the two-person office within two years and the five-person office within three. By year five of the business I had recognised my weaknesses and brought in Stephanie Carter-Smith as a general manager. Together we pushed ahead, and she encouraged me to look for things outside the region.”
In 2007, Nickie tendered for the biggest event contract she had ever seen – Edinburgh’s entire Christmas experience – and, to her astonishment, she won it. She was riding on the crest of a wave, with everything finally falling into place, then, on December 19 – having been named North East Woman Entrepreneur of the Year, and the day after celebrating She’s Gott It’s fifth anniversary – Nickie was diagnosed with breast cancer.
“I was in shock – you go into automatic pilot,” she says. “But there were some very weird sides to it. I was met by a nurse in reindeer costume and a nurse in fairy costume. It felt like something from a really weird movie.”
Nickie spent Christmas and New Year in hospital, having a lumpectomy and lymph glands removed, yet she was determined that the business wouldn’t suffer, and continued to work through her chemotherapy. “I treated it like a project – I diarised my peaks and troughs,” she says. “I had chemotherapy every two weeks and had to have my bloods taken the day before, and the nurse used to come and do it in the boardroom.”
Since then, Nickie has continued to battle with ill health. She has undergone a hysterectomy, suffered skin cancer as a result of having radiotherapy and has had repeated bouts of cellulitis arising from her scar tissue. Her enthusiasm for work, and for life, however, remains undimmed.
Whether on a field in wellies or in a ball gown sipping champagne, Nickie says she and her team devote the same passion and commitment. They take care of everything, from costumes to canapes, and, having started out with mainly public sector clients, in the past three years they have reversed this, with 90 per cent of business now coming from the private sector. For future growth, Nickie has set her sights on blue chip companies throughout the UK, reasoning, “Why not? Why not make it happen in the North-East?”
Her dedication is unswerving. “It doesn’t matter what it is – it’s about the experience, so the minute you enter an event site you have to get an experience,” she says. “Everything has to have magic in it – otherwise we don’t do it. As long as what we do shines, long may it continue.”
