(1) You’ve got to have balls of steel and you’ll always find a way.” But Mone has also always exhibited an intuitive understanding of what the market, and the media, want.
(2) Also lined up by the Tories is Michelle Mone, the founder of the Ultimo lingerie brand , to become a peer just weeks after she was appointed as the government’s new entrepreneurship tsar for areas of high unemployment.
(3) I think I’ll always have that.” Michelle Mone: My Fight to The Top (£18.99, Blink Publishing) is available now.
(4) A lot of business people have said you didn’t have to be so open, but at speaking events I always tell people you should be honest.” In person, Mone, 43, is far gentler than her well-branded public persona would suggest.
(5) Mone, who made no secret of her concerns about the impact of a yes vote on business, writes with winning directness in her book about being invited to Downing Street along with other Scottish grandees to discuss the referendum campaign with David Cameron.
(6) But Michelle Mone – Ultimo lingerie tycoon, serial entrepreneur, international speaker – is unique in many aspects.
(7) It’s about keeping businesses going rather than having a start-up, some soft grants then within six months everything’s gone.” I tell Mone that her women-can-do-anything epilogue reminded me of Nicola Sturgeon’s rousing speech in the Scottish parliament when she was elected the first female first minister last November (although the epilogue, and indeed the entire book, is rather more sweary than the Holyrood debating chamber is used to).
(8) I did sit down and think about it long and hard,” Mone explains, perched in the immaculate living area of her family home in one of the grandest parts of Glasgow’s west end.
(9) They need a sounding board.” Mone mentors more than 100 new businessmen and women – “not that I have all the answers” – and hopes to see Westminster establishing more programmes like hers.
(10) The Department for Work and Pensions said Mone, from Glasgow, would look at how to encourage benefit claimants, women, young people, disabled people and ex-offenders to become entrepreneurs.
(11) Michelle Mone: My Fight to The Top (£18.99, Blink Publishing) is available now.
(12) Michelle Mone – tipped to be on the list of new peers, expected to be revealed later this month – will lead a review of obstacles faced by people in disadvantaged areas when it comes to setting up their own businesses.
(13) Michelle Mone of Ultimo: 'In business you have got to have balls of steel' Read more She came out against Scottish independence during the referendum campaign, and in the runup to the general election said: “I’ve always been Labour through and through.
(14) Units of Para-Thor-Mone (Eli Lilly and Co), seven conscious, non-pregnant, non-lactating Merino ewes were infused with a maintenance dose of the hormone at a rate of 4-75 U.S.P.
(15) It was because I had never seen a lingerie brand that had a black model,” Mone explains simply, “and I was getting angry about it and I thought: ‘I’m going to do it.’ I just wanted to say: ‘We are an international brand, we have international customers, and I don’t care what colour of skin you have.’ It was a big statement.
(16) Established business-folk don’t tend to publish eye-wateringly honest autobiographies, as Mone has just done.
(17) She glides over any mention of Sturgeon, but commends Scotland’s female role models generally and says: “I’m all for helping women with their confidence, and once they get that, nothing can stop them.” Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘When I started, a lot of the lingerie companies were run by men,’ says Michelle Mone.
(18) My Fight to the Top, which entered the Amazon charts at No 1, is a straight-talking account of Mone’s objectively awesome trajectory from teenage mother who left school with no qualifications to one of the country’s most successful female entrepreneurs.
(19) And not through nudity or foul language, but because while Gawain "made myry al day, til the mone rysed" (ie lounged in the castle, flirting with the ladies), the lord of the land was out gralloching.
(20) When I started, a lot of the lingerie companies were run by men, and I came out with these inventions they’d never thought of because they don’t wear bras... Like the backless bra, the frontless bra, designs that I only came up with because I got so frustrated that I couldn’t see anything out there already.” Michelle Mone: ‘My party trick is measuring people’s boobs with my eyes’ Read more Likewise, Mone’s genius for publicity was evidenced by her simple calculation the media will always love photographs of celebrities in their underwear.