I was eighteen when my father refused to let me go to university, despite the offer sitting in my hands. So I did the next best thing: seven years of night classes, twice a week, an hour each way, to earn my diploma in accounting. That was the first time I learned that when the front door closes, you build your own way in.

I married young - the first man who showed interest in me. Seventeen hard years, and one beautiful daughter who made every one of them worth surviving. When I lost him to suicide, and then learned things in the aftermath that broke me open all over again, I understood something I'd carry into every room for the rest of my life: you never know the whole of what a person is walking through. So lead with humanity. Always.

I rebuilt. I built a business. I met my husband Paul - my soulmate, the man who would later drive me to the Warwick wineries with no phone and no plan on the worst week of my life.

Because there was a worst week.

The business I built grew faster than anything I'd touched - two hundred students a week, an 85% completion rate when the industry sat near three. And then it collapsed under its own pace. A seven-year liquidation took the company, the assets, and our family home. I sold everything to pay the company's debts and started again.

What I remember most from that day isn't the grief. It's my staff - 95% of whom stayed on unpaid to help move the furniture before the liquidators arrived - gathering around me in a circle, handing me a card they'd bought the day before because they'd sensed something was wrong.

That circle is why I do what I do now.

Nearly thirty years in education and training. An MBA finished at sixty-three, with tears when it arrived in the mail. Seventeen businesses. And one philosophy that runs through all of it: circles, not ladders.

I'm still becoming. And I love the journey.