I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard the phrase ‘It’s business’ during my working life. And by that people mean ‘This isn’t personal. Don’t get emotional.’ Try telling that to someone who’s got three kids to support and has just been sacked.
Work is personal. Really personal. Through it, we can create a sense of progress, accomplishment and community. It fuels our self-esteem, happiness and confidence.
The kinds of feelings that anyone who says, ‘It’s business’ means are the ‘messy’, ‘feminine’ ones, like sadness or fear. Start crying in a business meeting and your card will be marked. ‘Weak’ emotions have no place in alpha culture.
But the irony is that the whole thing is deeply emotional: wanting to smash the competition and be top dog isn’t exactly unfeeling, is it?
For me, starting to work like a woman was all about putting more feeling into work – not less – by learning to allow a whole spectrum of feelings to come into play.
To get you to the point where I started to do that would mean talking you through every cough and spit of my first decade in business, including my holidays to my favourite Greek island and Kevin the canary dying.
I won’t.
Suffice to say, I continued to work how I’d always worked for many years after starting the agency. Falling in love with a woman might have shifted something fundamental in me but it didn’t transform me overnight into a whole new person at work.
Professionally, for a long time, I was pretty much the same old Mary and continued to follow the rules I’d been taught by alpha culture: I was a good negotiator, focused on the bottom line and fiercely ambitious. All of which served me well.
It was only when I unexpectedly launched a whole new career that I started on the journey that would eventually lead me to finding a new way to work.
When Graham left the business following our divorce, Peter Cross joined me at the agency as managing director and soon became my closest professional confidant and dear friend. For the next decade, we worked to build a business with global brands like Louis Vuitton, Acne and Mercedes. The Portas team grew to about forty people and it was a fun, creative and exciting time.
Then, in 2006, I was approached by the venerable TV producer Pat Llewellyn, who’d seen me appear as a guest on an afternoon TV show and thought I’d be good doing more on screen. She signed me up to present a show that featured me going into small struggling retail businesses and applying my ideas and experience to turn them around. It’s worth pointing out that I was forty-six when I started this new career, so give yourself a talking-to the next time you tell yourself you’re too old to get the job/fall in love/move home. You are not!
Mary Queen of Shops first aired on the BBC in 2007 and I went on to make two more series – and meet the most wonderful cast of characters. People like Denny and Dazzle, whose furniture shop in Kingston-upon-Thames looked like a dodgy YMCA meets Russian swinging party when I got there. I don’t think they knew what had hit them when I arrived.
Denny and Dazzle were a unique combination and I couldn’t help but like them. They were good, talented people, who’d never had any real business guidance. They were making many mistakes and losing a lot of money. Advising them gave me a huge sense of satisfaction. As did seeing them flourish and regain their confidence as I worked with them.
I connected with everyone I worked with. Well, almost. The less said about Angela-the-baker-who-eventually-barricaded-herself-in-her-shop-and-refused-to-let-me-in the better. I never felt like I was making a TV show. This was personal: I was advising people on how to protect their livelihoods and their sense of self-worth. All those I worked with were grappling with a sense of failure because their business was failing, and I helped them replace that with hope. It was really rewarding to do so.
In 2009, the format was tweaked and, instead of going into privately owned shops, I tackled charity retail. So many of these shops look and feel down at heel. They often seem unloved, and people complain there are too many of them on high streets. But the core of charity shops is about people giving back: they’re about community, staffed mainly by local volunteers, and raise money for vital causes. They should be a treasured part of any high street.
I thought that transforming charity shops into beautiful spaces people wanted to shop in could transform their image – and fortunes. People would donate better stuff, there would be new volunteers and more money would be raised for important causes.
I thought a lot about it and felt really committed to the project. What I hadn’t expected, though, was to meet a generation of women who profoundly changed me.
Arriving in the Orpington branch of Save the Children, I found many of the volunteers were older women, the kind of women who’d disappeared from my life after my parents died. Stuck among the china figurines and tatty paperbacks were women with a deep sense of duty and social conscience, women who wanted to give up their time to help those less fortunate than themselves.
It was a world away from the individualistic sphere of work I was used to. Those women didn’t give a toss about status and power – as I found out early on when I asked one to change the outfit on a mannequin. ‘Do it yourself,’ she said, to the TV presenter/CEO/one ‘in charge’.
I was speechless. Then I laughed.
On the final day of filming, the volunteers lined up to say goodbye and I felt truly sad that I wouldn’t see them again. There was Brenda, smiling broadly at me alongside the octogenarian ‘toy twins’, who turned up every single day, come rain, snow or shine. I knew then that I just couldn’t leave them all behind, pack up another piece of work well done. Because what had struck me most while working with them was this: what was I giving back?
The thought stayed with me as the show aired and the overhaul of the Orpington shop proved a great success. It went from being one of Save the Children’s worst-performing stores to one of its top ten. Soon, I approached the charity – headed by two great women, Tanya Steele and Jayne Cartwright – to partner with me on expanding the concept.
We opened the first Mary’s Living & Giving charity shop in 2009. Today there are twenty-five stores, which have raised more than £12 million for some of our most disadvantaged children. And while I’m delighted this money has supported such vital work, I’m no selfless do-gooder. Starting to give back taught me one very important lesson: you get as much, if not more, in return for what you give.
I don’t know whether to cry or be sick.
I’m staring at a headline in one of Britain’s biggest newspapers. It reads: ‘Mary the Queen of Flops’. Yet another article attacking me publicly.
Every time my face is on a page under yet another crappy headline, I want to bury myself a bit more. But I can’t. I have a business to run, employees and, of course, a family to look after. People depend on me and I have to keep going however much this hurts my pride. I try to get angry when I’m attacked. But mostly I just feel incredibly hurt.
It started in 2011 when the government asked me to look at issues affecting Britain’s high streets and deliver a report on safeguarding them for the future. I desperately wanted to do this piece of work because, having travelled the length and breadth of the country while filming my TV series, I’d seen up close what was happening in many town centres. They were in trouble.
The reality was harsh. Boarded-up grocers, and fashion shops whose clients had deserted them in favour of out-of-town shopping centres or online retail, an explosion of pound and betting shops, libraries and community centres closing down, kids hanging around on street corners. It had made me understand that I could do nothing to help people whose businesses were dying if the town around them was dying too. They were fighting a losing battle.
I didn’t exactly have the time for extra work when I was asked to do the high-street report. By now, in addition to running the agency and TV work, I also had a fashion line, wrote a newspaper column and gave lectures. I barely found a moment to brush my teeth each morning.
But looking at what could be done to reverse the tide of decline was about protecting whole communities: a thriving high street is a focal point for people to gather and a place that provides jobs and other key services in addition to retail. It is the heartbeat of most communities. It goes way beyond politics. This was a vital piece of work that I had to do.
And, just like that, I naively went sailing into a perfect storm.
This project was political – a complex game of competing interests: national and local politicians who set business rates and created legislation; property owners who earned income from renting out retail spaces; shopkeepers; community groups and the public.
Everyone wanted a say.
For the next year, I spent at least one day a week travelling the UK to meet people and hear their ideas, talk about the problems and discover what solutions there might be.
When the report was finally published, it contained twenty-eight recommendations, including the setting up of ‘Town Teams’ to manage high streets, cutting through unnecessary red tape and implementing free parking schemes to encourage more footfall.
I also suggested testing the ideas in pilot projects, and soon £1.2 million of initial funding had been allocated for a dozen towns to do this. I was asked to put my name to the whole thing and agreed. I wanted to see the ideas tested and learn the lessons that might be adopted on a bigger scale.
But we should all – and this is a really key lesson I learned – play to our strengths.
I should have been happy with the work I’d done in analysing the state of the high street, walked away knowing I’d contributed to an important issue and left someone else to guide the project through choppy political waters.
I didn’t because I felt committed to it.
But the project had critical faults from day one. The money was enough to test ideas. It was there to help us start to get a deeper understanding of the needs of each town and act as a foundation for further work, but nowhere near sufficient to reinvent one high street – let alone twelve.
There was some truly innovative thinking happening at grass roots in the towns, from farmers’ markets to pop-up shops, the renovation of buildings and the development of ‘digital high streets’ – websites and apps that give vital information on local businesses. The number of pilot towns was ultimately extended, and so much inspiring, committed work came out of them, from Rotherham to Ashford, Loughborough to London.
But at a higher level, the whole thing became a political bun fight, more about power-playing and one-upmanship than collaborative pulling together for the greater good. There were, of course, some great people involved, but also many others with louder voices who were there to knock their opponents and drive their own agenda.
I should have felt at home. I was used to all that power-playing in the working world. But I just found it depressing in that context.
Soon newspaper stories started to appear detailing all the ‘failures’ of the high-street pilots as the chorus of disapproval grew louder. This was the government’s project more than mine: ministers made key decisions while I was an adviser. But my name was on every headline because I was the figurehead.
Over the next year, the problems and criticisms kept coming: shops were closing in Portas Pilot Towns and the pilot money was not being well spent. The project had never been about short-term figures on shop closures, though. My ideas were about the kind of regeneration that would take years – but all that got lost.
My relationship with Peter, who had practically worked full-time with me on the pilots, was put under a lot of stress. We bickered, we fought and, after so many successes and nearly ten years together, the most significant working relationship I had fell apart as he left the agency.
I continued with a very heavy heart. The core of my business was strong because the agency continued to deliver good work, but it was a lonely, soul-destroying time.
And, deep inside, the sense of wanting to give back sparked by my time in the charity shops collided with the most bruising experience of combative working I’d ever had.
I knew I had to take some time to pull back and think, to learn what I could from all these experiences. Now Peter had gone, I also had to work out a new future for me as well as my business.
But what? I had no idea.
In the week Melanie gave birth to our son Horatio in September 2012, Mylo left our family home to start university. Two huge moments of change. But I hardly had time to let those events settle inside me because I was back on TV within weeks.
This time, I was making a series in which I went head to head with chef Gordon Ramsay as we ran a hotel: him in charge of kitchen and restaurant, me acting as general manager of the rest.
Celebrities would come in to work for us, as well as fourteen unemployed young people on work experience, two of whom would get a job at the end of the series – one with Gordon and one with me. The programme would also raise money for youth unemployment charities. Gordon and I would compete to see who could earn the most money.
It’s no exaggeration to say that I wanted to stick my head in a blender almost the moment the whole thing began.
It was excruciating.
Gordon Ramsay has made a name for himself by being big, loud and the most alpha in the room. I knew I was going to have to bring all my alpha game to the show – and more – if I was going to stand up against him and ‘win’.
So I did.
But instead of relishing the challenge as I once had, I found it demoralizing, soul-destroying and deeply unfulfilling. Marching around, trying to be the big I-am felt fake.
My alpha streak is, of course, a part of me and had also served me well during my career. But my TV work on Queen of Shops had tapped into another side of me. It was about more than swinging my balls. It was about emotionally connecting with people, and that was what I enjoyed. Not head-butting with Gordon Ramsay.
The show was broadcast live for five nights, and I’d get home to find Melanie on the sofa with the baby and a sad look on her face. Her expression said it all: what on earth are you doing?
By the end of filming, I felt as if I’d reached my lowest ebb. After the high-street pilots, the split with Peter and now this, I realized I was lost in a way I never had been before. And, for perhaps the first time in my adult life, strong, capable Mary Portas didn’t have an answer.
By a lot of people’s standards, I was successful: I’d built the agency, had other strands to my business life, and my TV profile had made me a bit ‘famous’. But was it all bringing me joy? We live in a world that idolizes celebrity but it didn’t feel that great to me.
In the months that followed, I couldn’t shake the feeling that somehow I had to make radical changes to my life and I thought more than I ever had before about how I was living it.
And what I gradually realized was that I’d spent my life since my parents died outrunning my grief, making myself so busy at work – and trying to provide financial security for myself and those I loved – that I didn’t have to stop and feel the deep sense of loss because I never wanted to feel that vulnerable again.
I’d become very strong, a provider, and chased the things that alpha culture had said would make me safe: money, success and power. And I was safe – financially at least. I just wasn’t happy deep in my soul.
I believe now that I had been preparing for that crisis point. My instinct had told me it was coming. In the years leading up to that moment, I’d been doing a lot of reading: everything from philosophy and science to spiritual thinkers: Aristotle and Socrates, Pema Chödrön, Vandana Shiva and Eckhart Tolle. Not having been to university, I had invested time at home in self-learning, and I drank it all in. I was looking for answers and ideas on how to make a really fundamental change in my working life before I even understood that I had to make it.
Some people, of course, do this kind of searching a lot earlier in life than I did. But now at fifty-two, well into middle age, I finally had a period of looking back at how I had lived, and forward to how I wanted to live the next stage of my life. I also had the luxury of having made enough money to step back from the day-to-day grind and take stock.
And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that while I was now softer, less guarded, less tough, and far more vulnerable in my personal life, I was still working in the way I had been taught: autonomous, single-minded and driven by the bottom line.
If I was truly honest, while I loved the clients I’d worked with for years and bits of what I did, I also didn’t love much of what I had created at the agency – even though the money was coming in. It wasn’t enough any more.
Using my mind creatively to help people and businesses effect change – and give something back to the greater good – brought me joy.
But how on earth could I change the way I worked? This was how I’d done it for more than twenty years. I was good at it. I was at the top of the pile in many ways.
To answer that question, I started to write down feelings and ideas, trying desperately to articulate what was going on inside me. I kept an orange notebook by my bed and would scribble down quotes that inspired me, as well as thoughts about what I enjoyed and what I felt uneasy with.
Here’s an example:
The book was a mass of ideas, thoughts and inspiration. But bit by bit as I filled it, I saw there was one central theme: control.
Now, many of us want to control our lives to make them safe. But I’d been maxing out on it: in rigid control of mine since the chaos created by my parents’ deaths.
Meeting Melanie had made me give up control personally in many ways because it forced me to live differently. And while my family and friends had been accepting, I’d also had to be out and proud about the woman I loved to the world at large because I had a public profile. The reaction of that world is something you can never control so I’d had to accept that I couldn’t. And it had taught me that I could not only survive but thrive when I did.
And yet, at work, my life was still dominated by control: trying to ensure there were concrete outcomes and income. It wasn’t making me happy any more.
The agency was successful and profitable, though. Was I really going to risk all that?
For the next year, I simply gave all these thoughts space. I sat with them. I gave them oxygen. I read. I meditated. I listened, I wrote. And I gave it time.
I slowly realized that what I really wanted to do was work in a way that reflected all of who I was and what I believed in, a way that not only played to my strengths but those of the people around me.
I wanted to allow everyone in my business to be true to what we did well and work with clients for the love of it – not just the profit. My intuition told me that working this way would bring true rewards: financial, emotional and professional.
And I somehow understood that the way to make this happen was by blending the ‘work’ Mary with the ‘private’ Mary and have my true self, my values and characteristics reflected in the way I worked. That meant tapping into my most feminine qualities – empathy, vulnerability, intuition and resilience – instead of suppressing them to fit into the alpha mould. It was time to work as I really was.
But how would I do that?