Member Article

From friendship to business partnership

What happens when best friends become business partners? Two mums talk about how they turned their friendship and passion for empowering young talent in to a successful partnership and business.

Friends, business partners and mumpreneurs Tiffany Newton and Elizabeth Blake Thomas met just over four years’ ago, and the duo’s shared passion to help empower young talent has taken them on a journey from friendship to partnership.

Both coming from creative backgrounds and experiencing first hand with their own children the barriers to entry in the creative industries, the enterprising duo established U+ which brings together creative young talent and a network of industry professionals to provide extraordinary opportunities to talented young people.

U+ is, however, more than just a business to Elizabeth and Tiffany - they have a solid direction for the company, and embody its ethos. On many levels they complement each other perfectly as business partners.

Here they each tell their story about how they came to be in business together and how they keep each other in check as they build the business and juggle busy family lives.

• Tiffany’s Story

Elizabeth and I have known each other for 4 years - we starting talking about our passions and desires to change things for young talented children like our own, early on in our friendship, and it was this shared passion that brought us closer together as friends. We became increasingly motivated by our shared excitement around the concept for what U+ has now become, and our existing company has grown since then, during which time I myself have had my second son!

Having had careers in production and media, both Elizabeth and I wanted to give back, and build up careers for ourselves in which we could include rather than exclude our families.

How U+ came about

I had my own film production business for years (Piper Films Ltd) and missed working with incredible, creative people making wonderful projects. However, I wanted to be able to be with my young family as well, and film production made that impossible. So having stopped work in film, I was looking for something to take its place which would help all the young people I had seen struggling for years.

U+ is a direct reaction to two problems: the number one reason why young people are not employed out of college is a lack of work experience, and the number one reason why young people can’t get into the creative industries is because of a lack of contacts. Elizabeth and I have the contacts and the motivation to want to change this and the passion to engage with young people. True to our ethos, the U+ team is made up of people under 25 years of age. We are giving them, and our members, the opportunities they have dreamt about.

Work-Life balance

It’s all about life balance. When you are a wife and a mother, so often you are pulled both ways by those who you love, and forget about what is important for yourself. It was impossible to continue doing independent production, but I needed something. So Elizabeth and I have built our own company in a new environment, with our families by our sides.

• Elizabeth’s Story

As a mum who had a child in a creative industry (Elizabeth’s daughter is Isabella Blake-Thomas best known for playing Lily-Rose in Green Balloon Club and Violet-Elizabeth in Just William) I wanted to give other members the opportunities Isabella was getting. No matter where they came from or what age they were, I wanted to give everyone an equal chance. I realised this needed to be done in a safe way so came up with an online talent platform.

Tiffany and I met at a party around 4 years ago and I introduced myself and realised immediately that we shared a passion, we had an instant connection and so I took her number. After several months we were under no illusion that we shared the same goals and wanted to do something positive with it! We developed the idea whilst having young children. In fact Tiffany had to take a few months downtime whilst baby number 2 was born. I kept ideas coming and we would have meetings whilst Tiffany breastfed, I looked after the other 2 and we created our website (whilst the dog barked!)

A symbiotic relationship

We have the most incredible relationship whereby we finish each other’s sentences; we know what the other is thinking, are open about our feelings, and I think coming to this as friends with a shared passion and then partners means we are on the same page.

We’ve had our growing time, and professionally we are in the same place with the same goals, constraints and responsibilities. It gives us a complementary understanding of each other’s requirements, abilities and commitments that make the partnership work.

We are Ying and yang, we work symbiotically. I am creative one who has the crazy concepts and ideas and Tiffany, fortunately, helps make the dreams come true. She once explained me as “a 100 mile an hour whirlwind, if you give her one idea she comes back with fifty!”

Tiffany crosses the t’s and dots the i’s. I would be the one that says lets climb the Shard on the outside, and Tiffany would say hold on, what do we need, let’s work this out and then the incredible team put everything into place.

As mums we work around the kids and make sure they are not forgotten. I’m fortunate in that Isabella is a big part of the company and therefore is part of day-to-day events.

I couldn’t do this business without Tiffany and she is as much part of my professional life as she is of my personal life.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Lorraine Allman .