Teenage entrepreneur looks to a healthy future

A TEENAGE businesswoman from Warwickshire has been hailed for her entrepreneurial talents after selling her first franchise – on her company’s first anniversary.

Samantha Hill, aged 19, from Binley set up Advanced Healing Therapies last year after discovering a revolutionary treatment that helped her mother’s chronic back and neck pain.

They visited the United States to see whether specialist technology would help to ease the 12-year suffering felt by her mum Sue Parker-Roberts.

It worked. But not only did it provide a solution to the pain, it gave the teenager a business idea.

Now, 12 months, after launching a clinic using the technology in Ferndale Road, Binley, she has more than 200 clients on her database and is operating at full capacity.

She has plans to sell Advanced Healing Therapies franchises up and down the country and the first has just been bought and will operate from Northamptonshire.

It has capped a busy and successful first year but the budding entrepreneur, who has just completed a research project with the Coventry and Warwickshire Chamber of Commerce, said she preferred it that way.

“Ever since a young age people have said to me that I was too headstrong to work for someone else and that I needed to have my own business,” she said.

“I always agreed but didn’t know what line of business it would be. When I worked in an office as a trainee, even then I was thinking I would run the company differently.

“We went to America to get the treatment for mum and it was simply amazing. It was immediately obvious that other people could benefit and that gave me the idea for the business as nobody else was doing this in the UK.”

She said she was putting what she had learned at the chamber to good use and it had helped her deal with prejudices people had about dealing with someone of her age.

“The research was surrounding what it’s like being a young entrepreneur and people can be quite stereotypical about someone my age.

“But when people hear what I have to say and the way I am going about things they normally come round,” she said.

Lesley McCall, from the chamber and deputy director of Young People’s Enterprise Centre of Expertise (YPECOE), said: “Samantha is a great example of young enterprise.

“Entrepreneurship was always in her blood and it just needed a spark of an idea for a business. She is making it a real success.”