Kaye and Steph founded SK Chase back in 2003. The company provides technology and services for swanky hotels, enabling them to sell gift vouchers through their own websites. Kaye and Steph are (respectively) Managing Director and CEO of SK Chase, and I joined them as Projects & Communications Manager last year.
I’ll start with a bit of background to us all – not the Corporate-speak nonsense we found in Kaye and Steph’s “official” biographies, but all the real stuff that brought us to where we are today…
Steph Wilson:
Steph has been working since she was about 14, starting out as a fledgling entrepreneur by running paper rounds, egg rounds, and other money-making schemes that she pooled with her mates to maximise booze and fags income. She grew up in Edinburgh (where we’re all based now), and left home at 17 to live in a “dodgy wee flat” (as she puts it) in Leith, and work in the Carlton Highland Hotel as a receptionist. This was instead of staying on for a 6th year at high school and becoming a languages teacher which was the original plan, and what her Mum thought she was doing until the day that school went back after the holidays!
At the Carlton, Steph met and started dating Dav Wilson until around 6 years ago when he proposed by accident and they decided to get married. Meanwhile, she worked her way up the career ladder in various hotels across Edinburgh, and ended up at the Townhouse Company as their Reservations Supervisor before being promoted to their senior team as Revenue Manager, where she met Kaye Taylor.
Steph is a fish-eating vegan and probably one of the fittest people I know. She genuinely loves exercising, and could beat most people I know at arm-wrestling - I went to a spinning class with her once and nearly fainted. She’s the structured half of the SK Chase partnership, and is the reason the company has documented procedures, budgets, telephones and warm offices.
Kaye Taylor:
Kaye was brought up in Exeter and then Maidstone, and left school at 16 to become a Saturday girl at a clothing store, and in her own words “to do as little as possible”. After being dragged by her (despairing) mum to a careers advisor, Kaye ended up in a London travel agency where she discovered that she actually loved working, and spent the next seven years learning on the job, moving through telesales, product development, web design, sales & marketing and grabbing any experience she could get her hands on.
After travelling round the world with her then-soon-to-be-ex-husband, Kaye came to Edinburgh and worked in Marketing for Haggis Backpackers (where she worked with Dav, who would later marry Steph - although neither knew it at the time) before moving to the Townhouse Company as their Marketing Manager.
Kaye was introduced to Iain Taylor by his dad Peter (owner of the Townhouse Company), and married him in June 2005. She gave up smoking and drinking 7 years ago, followed by junk food a couple of years later, and now enjoys yoga, a vegan diet and a glowing complexion!
If Steph is the structured half of SK Chase, then Kaye is the creative (and chaotic) half. She’s the kind of person who has about 17 ideas a minute – ranging from pure genius to completely barking. The gift voucher concept was Kaye’s brainchild right back at the beginning, and she naturally gravitates towards the sales, marketing and development side of the business.
SK Chase:
After they met initially at the Townhouse Company, Kaye and Steph didn’t interact an awful lot, being work colleagues in different departments. However, following what I’m told was a passionate discussion during a management meeting - misinterpreted by their then boss as a proper cat-fight - they were sent on a training course in Belgium together “to bond”. By the end of the trip, the concept of SK Chase had been born and the pair had enlisted each other as business partners.
With phenomenal support from the Townhouse Company (Peter Taylor, the Chairman, gave up his own office so that the young SK Chase could have a home) Kaye and Steph incorporated the business in August 2003, spent the next year building their technology, and began trading in June 04.
Kaye left the Townhouse Company in December 04 to focus full-time on SK Chase, and was followed by Steph in March 05. The pair worked by themselves in the attic of one of the Townhouse Company’s hotels until they were ready to start recruiting for extra help and moving to their own premises. Since then, SK Chase has been growing at a rate of knots. We’ve now got about 180 hotel clients (12-15% UK 4/5 star market share) and employ 5 permanent staff in Edinburgh with another 3 on retainer to help with sales and training.
We recently launched a new arm to the business, where we sell our hotel clients’ gift vouchers on their behalf through our own website www.kisschasegifts.com. Kiss Chase gives us the chance to indulge our quirky, sexy side as a business, and we’re all really excited about it!
Elaine Gunn (me):
I moved to Edinburgh from Thurso (very far North of Scotland) in 1997 to get a degree. I’d been working on and off in various waitressing and supermarket jobs since I was 12, and found out pretty quickly after moving to Edinburgh that I was completely unsuited to academic life.
However if I was a rubbish student, then I was even more rubbish at realising that! After very nearly failing my first year, I changed degrees and colleges and did slightly better – mostly because the lectures were smaller and there was more danger of getting caught sleeping. However I finally figured out that Uni life just wasn’t for me, so I gave it up and made a part-time bar job into my full-time career.
A couple of years working 80 hour weeks in various Edinburgh pubs were enough to convince me that staying any longer would leave me gnarled and cynical, so I got myself an easy, responsibility-free, every-weekend-off job inputting numbers for the Bank of Scotland – just for 6 months before I planned to go travelling. Six and a half years later I was still there - not so much well-travelled as well-versed in the arts of data processing, office politics and Microsoft. I had clawed my way up to junior management level, and taken on a project/marketing/communications type role in the bank’s Women in Business team.
At the end of a truly nightmarish week-long conference organised by my WiB colleagues in November 06, I was in the pub for a post-conference party, drinking many large glasses of white wine. My duties during the week had mainly involved sprinting about randomly according to the whims of 20 or so high-powered businesswomen who might have strolled out from between the pages of The Devil Wears Prada, so I was ready for a drink. I gravitated towards the two people at the party who looked least likely to demand that I perform some demeaning task for them, and that’s how I met Kaye and Steph! After a good laugh in the pub, 8 months, and a bit of cheeky headhunting, I joined SK Chase and haven’t looked back since.
In terms of my role in the business, this has been dictated to a certain extent by my skills. I’m naturally creative, but 6.5 years of working for a big corporate machine has bent that into a more structured shape. Therefore (and a bit bizarrely) I’m as comfortable writing poetry for Kiss Chase as I am coding databases. Don’t ask me to count anything though, as I have absolutely no head for numbers.
At home, I live with my lovely husband Angus in a big old house where everything breaks.
So that’s us:
Kaye, Steph and I will all be writing for Lady Chase whenever anything interesting happens or we feel there’s something we want to share. Three different women means three different points of view, so we should end up with a good, rounded picture of what it’s like running (or helping to run) a business. We all hope you enjoy reading our blog – feel free to send us a message if there’s anything we write that strikes a chord with you. We’re here to share our experience, so any questions or comments are extremely welcome.
Take care
Elaine
Steph
Kaye
Kaye Taylor
Elaine Gunn
