Scale Her Up: Female business stories and expert tips for business growth and success

In this episode of Scale HER Up, I'm joined by Pamela Malpas — CEO of One Office Technologies, a second-generation family IT business that's been running since 1992.

Pamela didn't exactly plan to end up here. She studied fashion at Heriot-Watt in the Borders, went into visual merchandising in Aberdeen, and was working in marketing in Edinburgh when her dad suggested she come in and try it. She walked through the door intending to do marketing, and never did a day of it. She's a self-described "born fixer" — and once she got into the business, the operations side pulled her in and never let go.

One Office Technologies is an IT partner for small and medium-sized businesses: the outsourced internal IT department that builds strategies, plans, budgets, and implements the technology that keeps businesses running. Pamela runs it alongside her brother, who came up through the business as a photocopier engineer and now handles account management and sales. Their parents — who founded the company — have now fully stepped away. And Pamela has discovered that helping a founding generation retire is its own kind of project management.

We cover:

• What One Office Technologies actually does — and why getting the IT fundamentals right matters more than chasing the latest tech trend
• The danger of reacting too quickly to new technology: cloud, AI, and building blocks that fall
• The transition from reactive support to proactive, planned IT strategy
• What Pamela learned walking into the family business "to do marketing" and ending up running operations
• How she and her brother navigated taking over — and helped their parents learn how to retire
• The responsibility of inheriting a business someone else built from scratch
• Women, risk aversion, perfectionism, and why done really is better than perfect
• A walk in the sunshine that ended in a drenching — and everything it says about keeping your blinkers on
• The coach, the pod of 10, and the wider support network that keeps her going
• Why opportunities don't always present themselves the way you'd expect — and how to stay open to them

Quote of the episode: "Don't make decisions for fear. Because you're scared of something, don't avoid it — head into it. Get comfortable with the feeling." — Pamela Malpas

Sarah Medcraf moved to Moray at 18 because her boyfriend was in the RAF and she thought, "if it doesn't work, I'll just move back to Yorkshire." That was 2009. Today she's the CEO of Moray Chamber of Commerce, a director of Scottish Chambers of Commerce, and one of the most quietly compelling voices on what it actually takes to lead a business, a team, and a region through everything from a global pandemic to a wildfire season.

She didn't take a straight path. She applied for a marketing role she wasn't qualified for, got turned down, and was offered a different job on the same phone call. She spent the first four or five years digging in and proving why she was there. It wasn't until she came back from maternity leave in 2018 that everything clicked — she finally knew what the region needed, what the chamber was supposed to be, and how to get there.

In this conversation, Sarah talks about imposter syndrome in a way you won't have heard before — including the uncomfortable truth that it gets harder, not easier, as you get older and learn how much you don't know. She talks about the importance of knowing when to sit in the mud with someone, and when to get the whiteboard out. And she shares two ideas from this episode that I guarantee you'll be using by next week.

The pizza boardroom. The I love me folder. You need both.

• Moving to a new region at 18 with a wing and a prayer — and what happened next
• The job rejection that led to the right job, on the same phone call
• Why the chamber is nothing like the "stuffy old man's club" people assume it is
• Imposter syndrome gets harder as you get older — here's why, and what to do about it
• "Do you want comfort or solutions?" — the one question that changes every difficult conversation
• What the first week of COVID looked like from inside the chamber: 78 phone calls, zero answers
• Emotional contagion: why Sarah's mood sets the tone for her whole team every morning
• The pizza boardroom — how to run a boardroom without forming one
• The I love me folder — the simplest, most effective thing you'll do this week
• Why women focus on the one negative instead of the 99 positives — and how to stop

Quote of the episode: "Do you want comfort, or do you want solutions? Tell me what you need, and we'll deliver that."— Sarah Medcraf

Playlist song: This Girl Is On Fire — Alicia Keys

Lesley Whyte didn't set out to be an entrepreneur. She was studious, academic, and fully expected a career inside universities. What she didn't expect was that a job in Dumfries, a chance meeting with an IT-minded colleague named Eric, and a radical idea about how libraries could access information would lead her to co-found a business that now employs 60 people and underpins how libraries and publishers across the UK work every day.

Bibliographic Data Services — BDS — provides metadata for books, music, film, and computer games to libraries, retailers, and e-tailers. It's a niche that didn't really exist when Lesley started out in 1987, and a business model she and Eric had to essentially invent. When they launched in late 1994, the internet was barely a word most people had heard — and yet it was the internet that made BDS possible.

In this episode, Lesley talks honestly about the confidence she didn't have as a young woman, the slow accumulation of experience and self-belief that changed everything, and why she thinks women need to stop standing in each other's way. She also shares one of the more striking stories you'll hear on this show — her mother's reaction when Lesley announced she was starting a business.

This is a conversation about the long game: building something over three decades, finding the right co-founder, adapting to technology, and choosing, every time, to believe that what you're doing has value — even when the people closest to you aren't so sure.

• How BDS got started in 1994 — and why the internet made it possible when nothing else would have
• The Princess Diana publishing story: how BDS proved its model on the day the world changed
• Co-founding with Eric — a partnership that has lasted 30 years and never had a dull moment
• Why Lesley had no idea she was an entrepreneur until she was already one
• The mother who said "the last thing you need is to start a business" — and the church member who called it criminal
• Why women are sometimes the least supportive of other women — and what Lesley thinks we should do about it
• AI at BDS: using it to cut the laborious work while protecting the human expertise that makes metadata valuable
• "Be brilliant" — the mantra John gave Lesley that she now uses with her whole team

Quote of the episode: "If we don't allow women to advance, then what's the point in educating them?" — Lesley Whyte

In this episode of Scale HER Up, I'm joined by Lucy Harrier — managing director of Prepress Projects Limited, a copy editing, proofreading, and publishing services company based in Perth, Scotland.

Prepress Projects has been going since the early 1990s, started by a husband and wife team. In 2022, it transitioned to employee ownership — a succession model that kept the business and the jobs in Perth. Fourteen of the 16 staff are women.

Their clients include UNICEF, UN Women, the UN Population Fund, and the Publications Office of the European Union. Most of their work is with overseas clients — they've worked with over 53 UNICEF country offices across the world, from Vietnam to Afghanistan to Uzbekistan.

Lucy came to Prepress from a completely different direction. She had a PhD in plant molecular biology and spent nearly a decade as a lecturer. Her mum spotted a small ad in the Courier and suggested she apply. She joined as a publishing assistant, enrolled in an MSc in publishing at the same time, and 20-plus years later is the MD.

We cover:

• What employee ownership actually means for a business — and why it was the right succession option for Prepress
• Brexit: how it wiped out ~15 EU agency contracts overnight, and the creative solution (a Luxembourg partnership with Lexilux) that got them back in
• Trump-era UN funding cuts: what geopolitics does to a small company in Perth with a global client base
• AI and copy editing: not a threat, but potentially a bigger opportunity — because AI-generated text still needs a human to check it
• The Institute of Directors: why becoming a Chartered Director transformed how Lucy approaches her role, and why she recommends it to anyone stepping into a directorship
• Resilience: navigating Brexit, a lost major UK contract, and personal bereavement at the same time
• The Monday Motivation: what Lucy publishes to the team every week
• A meeting in 2026 where a business contact spoke to her male colleague and ignored her entirely — and what happened next

Quote of the episode: "Treat people how you want to be treated yourself." — Lucy Harrier

Playlist song: Human — Rag'n'Bone Man ("It doesn't rev me up, but it gives me peace.")

In this episode of Scale HER Up, I'm joined by Rowan Morrison — co-MD and co-founder of We Are Rationale (or Rationale, day-to-day), a brand agency based in Edinburgh specialising in regulated markets — financial services, healthcare, health tech, med tech. They're also a B Corp, which means values-driven impact isn't an afterthought. It's built in.

Rowan set up Rationale with her co-founder Sven Clouston six months before the pandemic. She is a Women's Enterprise Scotland ambassador and a member of the 93% Club — and this conversation goes into both.

She dropped out of school. She was the first in her family to go to university. Entrepreneurship wasn't something she saw people like her do. She came up through marketing, landed in a senior role she didn't ask for, was dragged into it by a mentor who saw something she didn't, and eventually broke out to set up something of her own.

She was also told by a previous CEO, in what was apparently intended as a pep talk, that she was probably his best performing MD — but that she didn't fit in. She was delighted.

We cover:

• What Rationale does: brand and creative strategy in regulated markets, emotional connection even in B2B and insurance
• Setting up six months before the pandemic and growing steadily through it
• How a female mentor saw something in Rowan before she saw it in herself — and dragged her into leadership kicking and screaming
• Dr. Martens at board meetings, challenging authority, and not being anyone else's version of a managing director
• The 93% Club: 93% of the UK went to state school, but a very small percentage own the wealth or run the businesses — and what that means in Edinburgh specifically
• Hiring for diversity of thought: why she wants people in her team who take things in directions she wouldn't have
• AI: where it's useful, where it's not, and why using AI to do your creative work is "feeding the lion that will eat you"
• Being proud of yourself as a mum and a business owner — and her sons telling her they're proud of her
• The David Bowie quote that sums up her philosophy

Quote of the episode: "You don't ever have to be someone else's version of who you are." — Rowan Morrison

In this episode of Scale HER Up, I'm joined by Kerryann Martin — owner and managing director of K&M Cleaning Services Limited.

Kerryann started in 2014. Her son was only months old. Her daughter was in nursery. The plan was simple: go out and clean some houses, work around the school hours, answer to nobody.

"Oh, how that changed very quickly."

Twelve years on, K&M Cleaning Services has 30 staff and a service list that now includes domestic cleaning, deep cleans, tenancy cleaning, commercial contracts, carpet and upholstery cleaning, laundry, and biohazard cleaning. None of that was the original plan. Most of it was opportunistic at first, then strategic, then (as she puts it) all at once because she couldn't help herself.

We cover:

• How K&M grew from domestic cleaning to biohazard — which bits were planned and which weren't
• What she wishes she'd known about running a business at the start — and why she's glad she didn't know it
• The growing risk appetite that took over the last couple of years ("I never done it in small doses either")
• The goalpost problem: getting the commercial client, the office, the van, the staff — and then needing more
• What she's learned about herself: patience, not taking it personally when staff leave, surprising herself
• The husband who picks her up when she wants to throw in the towel
• Learning from networks: Growth Nation, BNI, coaches Faye Mack and Strategy One
• Advice for her 18-year-old self: set goals, make a plan, go for it

Quote of the episode: "As long as you're doing better than what you were doing yesterday, that's all that matters." — Kerryann Martin

In this episode of Scale HER Up, I'm joined by Lyndsay Yuill — director of Rent Locally, a letting and property management company with an estate agency wing, based in the Central Belt of Scotland.

Lyndsay didn't plan to be in property. She worked in the care sector, running a project for young people in Edinburgh. When the funding was cut — as part of an equal pay anomaly that redirected council money — she landed in a letting agency while waiting for disclosure checks to clear. Within a year, she'd been headhunted to open a branch. Within the year after that, she set up on her own.

That was 2008. She founded Live and Let. Her now-business partners founded Rent Locally the same year. In 2012, they merged — same size, same stage, different geographies — and Rent Locally has been growing by acquisition, by systemisation, and by a relentless focus on communication ever since. They have 29 employees, a large network of subcontractors, and have won the gold award for Scotland's best letting agency at the ESTAS — voted for by customers.

We cover:

• What Rent Locally does, and why communication is their number one differentiator
• Balancing two sets of customers — landlords and tenants — and why 99% of the time it isn't actually that hard
• The 2008 financial crash as a fast learning curve: watching entrepreneurial landlords navigate the cycle
• Why Lyndsay merged rather than competed — and the smart logic of putting two companies together to unlock growth
• Growth by acquisition: why buying an existing book of properties is faster than growing one-to-one
• Matching personality types to roles — why the wrong person in the wrong job is a management failure, not a people failure
• Work-life balance: what it actually looks like in practice, and why booking downtime is an active, intentional choice
• The networking events Lyndsay runs — and why collective collaboration makes you bulletproof
• Being in cycle two of property after two decades: how you start seeing the same patterns and can help clients navigate before things go wrong

Quote of the episode: "Collective collaboration makes you bulletproof." — Lyndsay Yuill

In this episode of Scale HER Up, I'm joined by Alison Gray — founder of Skillfluence, a company that helps entrepreneurs, business leaders, and academic researchers get their ideas out into the world and make a difference with them.

Alison started Skillfluence after a project she led at work was so successful it got absorbed into a large organisation. She found herself getting worse at her job, not better. She took a sabbatical to San Francisco with her partner — six months, life savings, studied at Berkeley and Stanford, went to Toastmasters — and came back knowing she had to build something.

She left her job on a Friday and started at Entrepreneurial Spark on the Monday.

Skillfluence now has 12 core team members, 30-plus associates, a portfolio of mentors and speakers, and programmes running across the UK and further afield. Right now, there's a cohort of 30 female business leaders in the Highlands and Islands with a WhatsApp group that's, as Alison puts it, absolutely buzzing.

We cover:

• What Skillfluence does — for founders, entrepreneurs, and researchers trying to commercialise cutting-edge work
• The sabbatical that changed everything: six months in San Francisco, Berkeley, Stanford, and Toastmasters
• Building a team: why she started with associates, and what the first real hire taught her about what a business needs
• Recruitment: a process Alison has designed specifically to reveal who someone actually is before offering them the job (the surprise training delivery task at in-person interviews is particularly good)
• AI: where it helps, where it takes away, and why some things genuinely need to be your own words
• COVID: all the programmes fell off a cliff, and how being one month ahead of their clients felt like flying by the seat of their pants — but made all the difference
• The challenge of productizing something that's deeply tailored
• "It's not the knowledge that's the challenge. It's actually doing something."
• Why continuous improvement is more useful than regret

Quote of the episode: "It's not actually the knowledge and knowing how to do something that's the challenge for people. It's actually doing something." — Alison Gray

Playlist song: Titanium — David Guetta ft. Sia

In this episode of Scale HER Up, I'm joined by Nyasha Mangaba — managing director of Potters Healthcare Limited and co-founder, with her husband, of the Mani Group: a portfolio of businesses operating across Scotland, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Zambia, and Mauritius.

I invited Nyasha to talk about Potters Healthcare. What I got was rather more than that.

In Scotland, Potters Healthcare and sister company Mighty Care provide social support and home care to nearly 500 elderly service users across the central belt — Stirling, Falkirk, Clackmannanshire, East Dunbartonshire, Glasgow and West Lothian. The Mani Group also operates in logistics, farming, beef supply, genetic cattle breeding, retail, and fast food across four African countries.

All of it started because Nyasha's daughter was born with a hole in the heart, and she needed something flexible enough to work around her baby's medical care.

We cover:

• What Potters Healthcare and Mighty Care do — and how they've grown from zero to 6,000 hours of care per week
• Nyasha's background as an occupational therapist and why that gave her a critical advantage with local authorities
• Being hands-on in the business for seven years — and why that was a deliberate choice
• International recruitment after COVID: going to Zimbabwe for staff, getting a sponsorship licence, and the unexpected responsibility of helping people integrate into Scottish life (tatties, messages, and driving on the left)
• Managing across HR, immigration law, care legislation, and five separate software systems
• Six consecutive years of Grade 5 from the Care Inspectorate
• The highs: being recognised in Tesco by families she once cared for, Christmas cards still arriving from families she worked with years ago
• Her book: Shattered Yet Standing — ten stories of women who made it despite everything
• Her PhD in women's entrepreneurship and public health
• The church teaching that planted the entrepreneurial seed: always have something else coming in

Quote of the episode: "Don't look at seven-figure businesses and think you can't build up to that. Start small and scale yourself up. That's what a good entrepreneur should do." — Nyasha Mangaba

If you want to hear what real scale looks like — built from a care visit at a time, with empathy at the centre — this is the episode.

In this episode of Scale HER Up, I'm joined by Ros Marshall — managing director and co-founder of Molke Limited, an ethical underwear brand manufactured in Scone, rural Perthshire, now shipping to 72 countries worldwide.

You might not have heard of Molke. You should have. They make comfortable, supportive, non-wired bras in a size range that runs from a 26 band to a 54 band, and up to a P cup. They've been going since 2016. They have a Facebook community of 12 to 13,000 members. And everything is made in Scotland.

And it all started because Kirsty — Ros's co-director and the original founder — designed a bra for herself, put a picture on Facebook, and within days was completely overwhelmed by people who wanted one.

We cover:

• What Molke is, who it's for, and why size inclusivity is at the heart of everything
• The origin story: cloth nappies, a council losing its funding, and a friendship that became a business
• Direct to customer: why Molke has kept 99.9% of its business that way — and what that means for customer service
• What Brexit has actually meant for a small Scottish manufacturer exporting to 72 countries
• COVID: how Molke was one of the businesses that found itself exactly where the moment needed
• What Ros has learned about herself over 10 years of business: adaptability, unflappability, and "there is always a road"
• Stepping back from her ex-husband's priorities in her 30s, and what 2016 meant for her sense of self
• Her mum: one of the first women to qualify as a stockbroker, working in a male-dominated industry in the 1980s
• Being a real living wage employer, endometriosis-friendly, menopause-aware, and a Neurodiversity in Business founding member
• "You spend most of your life working. It shouldn't be a place you hate."

Quote of the episode: "There is always a road. It's just taking the time." — Ros Marshall

Whether you make something physical, ship something across the world, or just want to hear from someone who has built something genuinely special in Scotland — this is a great one.