Hayley Roberts had it all. And then she didn’t.
Professionally, she founded specialist IT cybersecurity distributor Distology in 2015, growing turnover to £63m, with 50 staff and offices in the UK, Netherlands and Germany.
Numerous awards followed and the proud mother of three grown-up children forged a reputation as one of the most respected voices in the industry.
Then she got divorced, and everything changed.
Roberts is one of a growing number of female founders to get divorced and has opened up about her experiences in the latest episode of The Naked Founder podcast.
She said: “I’ve changed a huge amount through my 20s, 30s, 40s that I think you start on a road of wanting to achieve something and be with somebody forever.
“But forever is actually a really long time nowadays. I think that what happens is we change the path in which we take, we change the desires we have, we change the goals that we have.
“I think you either evolve together or you evolve apart. And it’s a bit like somebody explained it to me once. It was like one degree of separation so you’re on a railway track.
“You don’t notice a change of one degree straight away but as you go further down the track, that one degree gets wider and wider. I think you suddenly just look and go, ‘I don’t know whether I want this anymore’. It’s a horrible thing to go through.”
“I don’t think the realisation just suddenly hit me one day. I think it was a gradual creeping up of I didn’t want to share my journey and my successes with the person I was married to.
Burnt chop syndrome
“As a woman and a mother, you always put yourself last. I think it’s called the ‘burnt chop syndrome’. It’s always you who takes the burnt food.
“You’ll give the kids and your husband the nicer stuff you’ve prepared and you’ll take the scraps.
“You’ll take the one that’s a bit shit. You’ll take the last omelette that was a bit crappy around the edges.
“I did that for years. It wasn’t like a major martyrdom or sacrifice. It’s just being a mum. You want the best for your kids. You want to give the best. You want to do the best. I loved being a mum.”
Facing up: Hayley Roberts answers the questions from Chris Maguire on The Naked Founder podcast
The mother-of-three said she was at ‘conflict’ with herself after having her third child.
“I knew I was never going to be mum of the year,” she said. “I love my kids. I wanted to do the best for them, but I wanted to find something for me as well. And I think that was the burning thing that got bigger and bigger and bigger.
“I wanted to achieve more for me and I don’t think you can get that from just seeing your children flourish because it’s still not you.
Can you have everything?
“Can you have everything? Can you have a successful marriage, a great relationship with your children, a great home life, a successful business and be happy yourself?
“I want to say ‘yes’, but you’ve got to understand that everything’s a gauge. It’s not 100 per cent. You can’t have 100 per cent at everything. Something has to give. Like, you know, my marriage had to give to a certain extent.”
Roberts said her divorce had a ‘massive’ impact on her, both financially and practically.
“It was a bitter moment,” she recalled. “It was horrible because it’s like your child. It was my child Distology. Your fourth child. My fourth child that I was developing and growing and nurturing and seeing people love it.
“It took me a long time to get over that. So yes, that came after the divorce, but the impact emotionally was massive.
“I tried really hard to mask how I was feeling, but I wasn’t in the office as much as perhaps I would have been. I wasn’t as buoyant. I mean, bearing in mind when you build a business, a lot of it is your personality.”
With her divorce firmly behind her, Roberts said she wishes her ex-husband nothing but happiness and told The Naked Founder podcast that life is good.
“I spent probably 10 years saying we’re just getting started, but I really mean it this time,” she said.
“We are at this great point in our business where not only are we a really good solid ship, so we were a good ship with calm seas. I want to say it’s like a destroyer because we can cope with the choppiest of seas now.
“We’ve got a great team, great leadership, great vendor spread, great customer base, really brilliant culture that’s constantly improving and developing. And we are on that nice trajectory upwards now.
“There’;s nothing that I’m fearful of that would really blow a hole in the hull. So I’m not worried about anything on that score. I just want to make sure we now capitalise on that. So that’s where we’re at as a business.”
Looking back, Roberts told The Naked Founder podcast that founding a business was the easy part, the hardest bit was evolving it.
As a child, she wanted to be an actress and follow in the footsteps of her hero Sir Laurence Olivier, but she entered the world of business.
Her first job was in a toiletry business but she admitted she was ‘unemployable’ before becoming a first-time founder when launching Distology.
She gave up a six-figure salary to launch Distology and didn’t take much money out of the business in the early days.
After six years, in 2021, Distology raised investment from NorthEdge private equity.
“I loved the process,” she said. “I had a great advisor and trusted them as well implicitly. And it was great. I met some brilliant people along the way.”
Asked what advice she’d give to would-be founders, she said: “Celebrate the little wins. Tiny wins. It’s a bit like making sure the tiny muscles around your big muscle groups are really well supported and you’re stretching and you’re doing all the right stuff because it’s those that will be the ones that will support you when you get older and everything starts to fail.’
Roberts said if she could write a letter to her younger self, she’d tell herself not to worry.
“Worry is just not productive,” she explained. “Don’t worry. Just don’t worry. Just make sure that the things that you can control, you action.
“If you can’t action them, then you just try and action other things. But worry is just not productive.”
You can listen to and watch The Naked Founder podcast here. It’s available on YouTube, Apple, Spotify and all good podcast platforms. It is sponsored by Financielle, The Home of Money for Women.
• If you’d like to sponsor The Naked Founder podcast or nominate future guests, email Chris.Maguire@BusinessCloud.co.uk