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Self-Improvement: Consultant Cleaned Up With An MBA
KIKI MAUREY spent the first 15 years of her life in a care home, before marrying and falling pregnant a year later.
Today she runs her own consultancy firm, counting Barclays among her clients. She also works as a consultant to the Department of Trade and Industry and is an associate director of Prowess, the women’s enterprise association.
It's an amazing transormation and one that would have been impossible without her decision, at the age of 38, to take an MBA course at Warwick Business School.
To Maurey this represented an opportunity to turn her life around, but it meant running up a large debt. To cover the cost of the course as well as provide for herself and her daughter while studying, she was forced to take out a loan that was equivalent to almost two-and-a-half times her mortgage.
Maurey, however, was determined. Her attitude was enough to win over the manager of the bank where she used to work as a cleaner. He offered her a two-year interest-free loan. Without this money, she would not have been able to take the MBA.
“He just said, if you have been able to do what you have from where you have come from, I don’t have a second thought about giving you a loan to go to business school,” said Maurey.
In 1990 she enrolled on the one-year corporate MBA course at Warwick. “It was hell on earth. It was a course that could make you or break you,” she said. However, the lessons she learnt were invaluable.
After graduating, Maurey set up KMCS, a corporate consultancy business, and within four years had paid off her debts.
Her life has changed a great deal since the day her marriage ended after 11 years, leaving her with a daughter, Nicola, but little experience of work.
“The prospects were not good. I had only five O-levels and had never had a proper job,” she said.
“I was known in Lyndhurst, Hampshire, where I live, as the village cleaning lady. My husband didn’t like me to work full time, so I was cleaning banks and doctors’ surgeries for pin money.”
But this experience inspired her to improve her lot. A year-long secretarial course was followed by six years of night school and a first degree at Southampton university. During this time she worked in local government and could easily have stayed there, but it was not enough. Only after completing her MBA did Maurey finally feel that she was able to realise her true potential.
“After a difficult childhood and difficult marriage, the big thing that has always driven me is becoming economically independent,” said Maurey.
“Going from hourly work as a cleaner, then coming out of business school and earning £200 a day was amazing.”
Today, Maurey is justifiably proud of having overcome so many obstacles to reach her current position. She is one of a tiny minority of black British women who have MBAs and appreciates the difference the qualification can make.
"You just wouldn’t believe what education does for someone who hasn’t had any opportunities,” she said.
Today she earns a comfortable income, works less than when she was a cleaner and yet, through her work with Prowess and the DTI, is able to do something she passionately believes in.
Being a public appointee is one thing I've always been committed to,” she said. “It doesn’t pay a lot but, as someone who spent 15 years in care, was a housewife and mother and a cleaning lady until I was 30, and yet has been able to do well, I can now put something back.”
Her work with Prowess involves lobbying government ministers to get more women into business. “We still have far fewer women in business than America or Australia. They are a terrific untapped economic force,” she said.
Despite this, when she first decided to study at Warwick, many people told her that doing so would be a mistake.
“My family thought I was crazy, that I had done really well in the 10 years since I was a housewife and cleaner, and that I should be content with my lot.
“They said to me, ‘Why do you have to leap off tall buildings without a parachute?’ “Well, I do it because I can.”
ABOUT KIKI MAUREY
Kiki Maurey is a keynote speaker and Senior Consultant at The Directors’ Centre, helping growing businesses to grow.
For further information, contact Tricia on 01225 851044. (ty@directorscentre.com) www.directorscentre.com
publication details
First published in Sunday Times, 19 June 2005.
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