You Don’t Have to Be Loud to Be Ambitious

Entrepreneurship is often portrayed as fast, bold and headline-grabbing. Pitch decks, scale-ups and overnight success stories dominate the narrative. But that version of ambition doesn’t reflect how many successful businesses, particularly those led by women, are actually built.

For me, it started at a kitchen table.

Seventeen years ago, Fabulous Welsh Cakes began with a simple idea and a lot of determination. I didn’t take on external investment or build a big business plan. I just started. I reinvested what I earned into the next step – packaging, a website, marketing materials – and slowly, steadily, the business grew.

Today, that small beginning has become a company suppling our 2 specialist shops, Welsh stadiums, top hotels and corporate clients, employing between 25 and 30 people, mostly women. I’m incredibly proud of that journey, not because it was quick or flashy, but because it was built with care, resilience and intention.

The truth is, I always had entrepreneurship in the back of my mind. Growing up, on my dad’s side of the family, everyone was in business. They were small businesses, pubs, betting shops, greengrocers, but business ownership was normal. Two of my great aunts ran pubs entirely on their own. Watching them made me believe, from a young age, that women could do this. It wasn’t some distant world that other people belonged to. It was real, it was accessible, and it planted a seed.

When I eventually started Fabulous Welsh Cakes, I was also a single parent with two young children. That shaped everything. I felt I couldn’t take big financial risks. Debt wasn’t even something I considered. My approach was to grow organically, slowly, and in a way that felt manageable alongside the responsibilities I carried at home.

Some people might see that as cautious. I see it as intentional. Ambition doesn’t always shout. Sometimes it quietly turns up every day for years.

Over time, I learned the business by doing it. I’d worked in large organisations before, and that experience gave me a grounding in managing people, understanding systems, and dealing with the realities of employment. Those lessons mattered just as much as capital ever could.

Now, as my business has grown, I feel a real responsibility to pull others up behind me. I have staff members with ambitions of their own, and I try to nurture that. I involve them in meetings, give them responsibility, let them see how decisions are made. Confidence grows when opportunity becomes visible.

I’ve also volunteered as a role model with Big Ideas Wales, going into schools to show young people that entrepreneurship is possible. One of the most important things we can do is make business ownership feel real and achievable, and not something reserved for a certain type of person.

That’s why storytelling matters so much. Women need to see different routes to success, not just the loudest or fastest ones. They need to see that businesses can be built gradually, on their own terms, in ways that fit real lives.

International Women’s Day should remind us that there is no single “right” way to grow. What matters is that women see entrepreneurship as a path open to them, whether it starts with a pitch deck or a griddle on the stove, and that once we’ve walked that path, we make it easier for others to follow.