Christy Foster has spent her life beating the odds.
The award-winning entrepreneur hasn’t let her autism, ADHD and dyslexia stop her building a £44m business – with zero investment.
When a male competitor threatened to put her out of business she ended up shutting him down and buying all his stock.
Last year she changed the company’s name from Online4baby to The Nursery Store after deciding it had become outdated.
She recently took part in BusinessCloud’s roundtable with female business leaders, run in association with GM Business Growth Hub.
“I always find that when I go to an event, I get ignored because it’s male-dominated,” she said. “I always think, ‘yes, we’re here’. Am I confident? Absolutely. But it’s taken a lot of years.
“Most of my C-suite are women. I’ve purposely gone out of my way to say, ‘put some CVs in front of me’ because the agency doesn’t put CVs in front of us ladies.
“Us women, we’re not supporting each other. I’m going to a few women’s supportive events and we need to get the younger generation involved. We need to bring them through from even my daughter’s age of 11.
“I have a mantra in life – you can do anything you want if you really believe you can do that. And I think I’m very invested in that, everything I do is calculated.”
Along with her sister Cheryl, Foster was raised in Oldham by a single mother and was working on a market stall from the age of 12.
Her neurodiversity impacted on her academically and she couldn’t read at school and didn’t get a single qualification.
“You could say being a woman and not getting education made me disappointing to the rest of the family but like my Mum said, everything I did to turned to gold,” she recalled.
“I earned my first bit of money – about £3,000-£4,000 – 40 years ago and just kept rolling it along
“I set the baby business up, met a banker when eBay started (getting big) and he said, ‘I’m going to shut you down’.18 months after I shut him down, I bought all his stock off him and I became one of the first two eBay millionaires.
“Then I set up my own website, took the business from zero to £44m with no equity investment, no banking investment. I maybe did it a bit too hard, you know, but I’ve loved it all the way. After 26 years we rebranded in 2024 to The Nursery Store and that was hard.”
In 2022 she was the Northern regional winner in the prestigious EY Entrepreneur of the Year Awards.
“It was a lovely experience but even going there, I might have been one of five female entrepreneurs out of 100,” she estimated.
“I’ve just got a new CFO who is a woman. There’s always female directors of finance but they never get to CFO level and it’s really hard. I don’t like to say this, but a lot of people are just put there for a number or a purpose.”
Foster is a patron of a local youth charity called Madhlo.
She added: “I’ve just started writing a book on the journey of a neurodiverse entrepreneur. The lady who is helping me do this is an award-winning author and she said: ‘Christy, you have to tell your story because it’s so interesting, because there’s so many things that’s happened to you’.
“Whatever obstacle is in my way, I just overcome it. There’s always a solution to a problem and that’s my mantra. And I think with women, you know, we’re never going to have it easy at all. We never have it easy. But I’ll die trying to make it easier.”
She was joined on the roundtable by: Susanna Lawson co-founder, OneFile and Circle of Trust; Alison Ross, chief people and operations director, Auto Trader UK; Janine Smith, director, GM Business Growth Hub; Sharon Amesu, Northwest Business Leadership Team; Lisa Morton, founder and CEO, Roland Dransfield PR; Clare Roberts, CEO, Kids Planet; Kathy Cowell OBE DL, group chairman, Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust; Alison Salas, senior marketing manager, Rochdale Development Agency; Shru Morris, CEO Designate at DSW; Tiffany Thorn, founder & CEO, BiVictriX Therapeutics Ltd; Beckie Taylor, co-founder Tech Returners and Empower; Chris Stott, managing partner, KPMG Manchester; Amanda Ruddiman, director, corporate finance. KPMG; Kirsty Smith, KPMG Emerging Giants team; Emma Birchall, partner, JS (Jackson Stephen); and Nicola Merritt, CEO of Cortus Advisory