“I SUPPOSE it all began when I was four. My mum couldn’t find me and it was only when she came outside our house on to the pavement she could see what I was doing,” says Emma Wimhurst.

At an age when most youngsters would have been stuffing their Christmas chocolates, Emma who lives near Wimborne, had worked out that her Cadbury’s miniatures could be sold... for 6p profit.

“When I give talks now I always say I targeted my audience correctly, because I always went for the old ladies because I knew they would take pity on me being four and cute,” she says.

“I also knew they would give me their penny and the chocolates back as well. I always think that’s the perfect business model: that you can gain profit, generate sales and get to eat the produce!”

This is all relayed without a trace of smugness, just Emma’s unstoppable enthusiasm. She is like a rocket in a pink cardie.

You’d have to be, really, to create a company from scratch and then sell it off a few years later for more than a million.

Emma’s company was called Diva. Not everyone knew its name but thousands, if not millions, will have bought the cosmetics it sold, via New Look, Wallis and Claire’s Accessories.

After leaving college at 18, going to Andorra, setting herself up as an English teacher, returning and working for an estate agent and for Revlon and Max Factor, Emma was beginning to feel the strain.

“It was only work, I had no play, ever,” she says. “I just worked and worked. Friday I was shattered, Saturday I recovered and Sunday I worked again, preparing for the next week.”

She left the city, returning to work briefly for a Bournemouth firm before noticing that a pop group called the Spice Girls was taking the teenage world by storm.

“I noticed they were wearing very loud designs and cosmetics and it set me thinking about the world of cosmetics; where do teenagers buy their cosmetics and makeup?

“Those girls wanted to buy an outfit every week and spend their money on fashion-line accessories, and I looked at the fastest-growing chain at the time, which was New Look, and thought, Why aren’t they doing cosmetics? It made sense to me.”

So she asked them. They asked her to produce the goods, and in a short space of time Emma was running her own – very busy – show. And then she had a baby.

She wants wannabe entrepreneurs to realise that working for themselves will be “harder than anything”.

“I’m always amazed when people tell me they have had enough of the long hours working for someone else and want to start off a business to make life easier.”

She has vivid memories of “creeping across the bedroom at 4am” to email suppliers in the Far East. Then one day, while lunching a contact at Branksome Beach café, talking about Christmas, she had her first “pivotal moment”. “It was a brilliant day in the middle of summer and I looked at the beach with all these babies playing with their mums on the sand and had a sudden jolt, thinking, ‘My poor baby – I don’t do that’.”

She resolved to sell the company and threw herself into family life with husband Mark and two more babies.

Then came pivotal moment number two. “I remember cooking an Annabel Karmel cookery book recipe. I spent the whole day making it and they wouldn’t eat it! I just burst into tears and realised I needed to get a life.”

Emma’s new life began when she realised that her success as a businesswoman and her obsession with detail could be translated into a business helping others.

She launched Empwr – her mentoring website – and now helps businesspeople move up to the next level, as well as giving talks, spearheading initiatives and appearing on the BBC show Beat The Boss.

She is part of the Make Your Mark campaign to encourage entrepreneurial behaviour among young people, and will launch the South West region’s arm of the forthcoming Global Entrepreneurship Week, later this month.

A book and yet more motivational talks will follow because, as Emma admits: “I absolutely love what I do.”

“I love imparting knowledge but hopefully in an empowering way. That’s how it came about,” she says.

“I actually like getting to understand what people want to achieve and enabling them to do that. I never feel threatened by other people achieving.”

  • Visit Emma’s mentoring website at empwr.co.uk.