I left school with one O-Level, built a £15m business, then got close to burnout

In business, so the saying goes, you can end up being a “busy fool” if you say yes all the time, chasing sales that don’t boost your bottom line while bringing on exhaustion.
Lee Thomas — owner of Aesthetics Event Staff, an agency hiring out temporary workers — risked becoming that busy fool. Soaring demand for her company’s services during and after the pandemic helped Thomas rack up record sales of £15.4 million in the year to April 2022, but also involved her working 15 hours a day, seven days a week.
Thomas, now 56, was soon on the brink of burnout. So, in July 2022, she cancelled the contracts early and shrank back down to sales of £3.2 million last year.
“We’re all so much happier now … I’ve never been one of those people who’s really motivated by money,” she said. And thanks to internally produced software that automated an array of business processes, her firm is more profitable than ever. Aesthetics Event Staff notched up a pre-tax profit of £660,000 last year.
Founded in 1996, the Warwickshire-based Aesthetic Event has for years been supplying everyone from hostesses to security guards to stadiums including Wembley and Twickenham. But when the pandemic came along, it opened up some unexpected new business opportunities, Thomas explained. “I got a phone call out of the blue from a company saying, ‘We’re doing Covid testing and we need staff … How would you feel about helping us out with some people to check temperatures and do some admin work?’ ”
There was a snowball effect. Thomas took on work supplying staff for TV productions by the likes of Netflix and Sky, as well as companies operating airports and shopping centres. But as the cash rolled in, her stress levels mounted, which was when she decided to walk away from the opportunities in front of her, and find a happier path.
Thomas grew up in a family of four on a council estate in Coventry in the 1970s. Her father was a scaffolder, her mother a legal secretary, and money was tight.
“We always struggled a lot financially. Dad did contract work, so there were times where we had no heating and no hot water. I remember that if we wanted a bath, we used to boil pans and carry the water upstairs,” Thomas recalled. Nevertheless, her childhood was a happy time. “We didn’t have any money but we always had lots of love.”
At school, Thomas said she lost the will to study after realising that the cost of university would be prohibitively expensive, resulting in her leaving with a single O-level in art to her name. She went on to take a Btec course in sport through the government-backed Youth Training Scheme, with her local scheme being run by fellow Coventry kid David Moorcroft, the former 5,000-metre world record holder and one-time chief executive of UK Athletics. She also worked as a lifeguard and behind the bar at the local working men’s club.
Thomas’s father drummed into her that computers were “the thing to get into”, so she applied for a course to gain a higher national certificate (HNC) in computer engineering. She became one of just two women to secure one of the 30 places on offer, which also paid trainees £40 a week.
Initially at least, however, she didn’t put her newly acquired skills into practice. When the 12-month course ended, she qualified as a swimming and lifeguard instructor, and worked part-time as a promotional model at car shows.
“Motor shows were very glamorous and they used to employ lots of girls to work on stands and speak about the cars. Because I was quite geeky, I was the one who would learn everything about a vehicle. So when guys would come up and assume you were just there to look nice, I would take great pride in flooring them,” smiled Thomas. She eventually worked exclusively for Vauxhall as a contractor, helping the car company find staff for launch events.
This was the role that convinced her she should set up her own business. She reckoned that temp agencies were guilty of lazily “delivering 50 bodies” to fill holes in the rota, rather than seriously considering their clients’ needs.
Yet as she was setting up her business, while still working with Vauxhall, Thomas became a mother-to-be. Rather than seeing her new venture as an all-consuming new undertaking, she saw it as an opportunity to escape her wearying travel schedule — which took her between her home in Coventry and Vauxhall’s offices in Luton and Cádiz, southern Spain — and spend more time with her first baby.
In the early days, Thomas turned down the opportunity to bid for a contract with Vauxhall worth £1 million over three years. “I said, ‘Thank you for the offer, but I don’t feel confident enough to do that yet and I want to be 100 per cent sure that I can deliver exactly what you want.” Three years later, the company offered her the opportunity again — and she won the deal.
Motor industry events were her bread and butter for more than a decade, and by 2008, Aesthetics Event had annual sales of about £2.5 million. But with the adventof the global financial crisis, which battered the car industry, events work quickly dried up.
However, Thomas had also started supplying staff to Keith Prowse, a company that provides high-end hospitality packages at Wimbledon and Royal Ascot. “Just having those staff out in the field meant other [potential] clients were seeing us. We got a contract with Manchester United and then Arsenal. Over the years, it’s gone from strength to strength,” said Thomas.
A career highlight was providing the staff to look after 300 of the royal family’s personal guests at Queen Elizabeth II’s 90th birthday celebrations in June 2016. “I was asked if I wanted to sit with the royal guests to watch [it]! I grew up on a council estate and now I get to go to some of the most amazing events in the world. I go to Royal Ascot every year in the royal enclosure; I’d never have seen myself there when I was growing up with no heating or hot water.”
Thomas said one of her best decisions was to develop her own software — launched in 2015 — to record staff profiles, track bookings, issue invoices and provide online training. “A lot of clients just want staff to turn up, and they’ll give them an hour’s training and want them to hit the ground running. So we developed our own training programme that our staff can take before they get out into the field.”
She said the software was developed further during the pandemic, to make it easier for Aesthetics Event to pivot into different industries as Covid brought many events to a halt and threatened the firm with closure. “My mum works in the business, as do my children, so we have three generations relying heavily on it. I went through all the finances, and because I’ve always been very careful, we had enough cash to be okay for a year at least.”
When the country reopened and orders started to flood in, Thomas had no problem finding the staff: through word of mouth, Aesthetics Event has amassed more than 40,000 temporary workers on its books, using about 2,500 on a regular basis. However, customers weren’t paying quickly enough to allow her to meet a wage bill that was in excess of £1 million in some months.
Successful applications for government-backed Covid loans helped Thomas through this sticky patch. Since then, she has tightened up her payment terms. “Now most of them pay on time, probably 80 per cent within 30 days — but before the pandemic, it was a lot less. We used to be like, ‘We won’t hassle them because they’re good clients.’ But in hindsight, you don’t get anywhere by not pestering them — they just won’t pay you,” she said.
My hero … Richard Branson because of his attention to detail and how he always strives for perfection. I’m the same. You’re only as good as your last job.
My best decision … to give our Covid clients notice that we wouldn’t be working with them anymore. It cost me millions but it was the right decision because health and wellbeing was more important to me.
My worst decision … to open an office in Dubai in 2010. I’m sure it would be different now because things have changed so much, but at that time it was very difficult as a woman to run a business. I closed it after two years.
Funniest moment … I’m often quite oblivious when it comes to famous people. I had been at Wembley Stadium for a football game but left at kick-off and jumped on a train. I was chatting to this guy for ages, just polite chit-chat, and I was asking him where he worked and he said, “Do you not know who I am?” It was Martin Keown [the former Arsenal defender].
Best business tip … Stick to your values. I’ve had opportunities that I’ve declined because I didn’t like the way they treated the staff.