From Yellow Pages to International Business

Gillian Murray, Founder and Owner of Slipperfield Building Consultancy and Slipperfield Training

LeadHer Founder Spotlight | July 2026

Twenty-five years in the industry. A director role at one of the world's biggest firms. A reputation built across the UK and Europe. And then, nearly a year ago, Gillian Murray decided to back herself and start something of her own.

Year one is never smooth. The cash flow was hard. The learning curve steep. She’ll do it again tomorrow.

Gillian is the founder of Slipperfield Building Consultancy, a chartered building surveying firm working internationally from a base south of Edinburgh, Scotland, and Slipperfield Training, a start-up stage global e-learning training business and digital coach for surveyors working with real estate. This is the story of her first year - honest, practical, and full of the kind of hard-won insight you only get from actually doing it.

She didn't plan any of this

Gillian's path into building surveying wasn't a straight line. In her late 20s, working in a shop in the Peak District, she bought a house with dry rot and watched a building extension go up next door. A chance conversation with a planning officer sparked something. A Yellow Pages search followed. Then a cold call to a local firm, a week of work experience, and a place at Sheffield Hallam University.

She was 27. One of three women in a cohort of forty. And she has never once looked back.

"I love it. It's a brilliant profession. I just love it."

That passion matters because building something of your own is a lot more sustainable when the work itself still lights you up. But it took another 25 years, a corporate restructure, and a client's well-timed nudge before Gillian finally made the move she hadn't known she was ready for.

When her employer announced a reorganisation, she saw it not as a setback but as a moment to pause and ask a bigger question. A key client indicated they'd bring work with them if she set up independently. Former colleagues were open to flexible arrangements. The pieces, unexpectedly, were already in place.

"I just gave myself permission to fail at any point, and to get a job. So if it didn't work out - just get a job, it didn't matter. But there was no harm in giving it a go and seeing where it got to. We're nearly a year in. I haven't had to get a job yet. All good!"

That permission - to try, and to fail without it meaning everything, is something she comes back to again and again. It's not recklessness. It's the quiet confidence of someone who knows her own worth, trusts her network, and has stopped waiting for the perfect moment that never quite arrives.

What nobody tells you about year one

Gillian went into her first year more prepared than most. She built what she laughingly describes as "a sledgehammer for a walnut business" - policies, processes, systems, all of it designed and in place before the work really started. Her logic was straightforward: sort the foundations now, while you have the time, so you're not retrofitting them under pressure later when you’re trying to grow.

It was the right call. But even with that preparation, nothing quite readies you for the psychological shift of running your own payroll.

"It's really scary when you know that you might not  have enough money in the bank for payroll. When you work in a big corporate, it’s the shareholders' money and you trust that someone else has kept an eye on the purse strings - it's not the same as when you've got your own payroll to hit."

Cash flow, she says, was the hardest part of year one. Not because she isn't good with numbers, but because the stakes are entirely different when it's your business, your team, and your name on every invoice. Clients in the public sector took longer than expected to get her onto their systems. Payments arrived a few days late. And suddenly, the timing of everything mattered in a way it never had before.

What caught her off guard in a better way was the network. When she announced the business on LinkedIn, a handful of fellow founders - environmental consultants, engineers, cost consultants, project managers reached out unprompted to say welcome, and would she like to meet? A year later, that informal group has become one of her most valuable sources of support, referrals and sanity checks.

"They've been an amazing support. Everything from 'do you know a good accountant?' to 'how do you deal with that kind of situation?' The system works."

None of it was strategic. It was just people, recognising a fellow founder taking a leap, and showing up. Which, Gillian thinks, says something important about what happens when you stop trying to do everything alone.

On leadership without the org chart

One of the subtler shifts of this year has been learning what leadership looks like when the hierarchy dissolves.

In her previous role, Gillian managed a team within a clear corporate structure. In her own business, things are necessarily different and, she says, considerably better. When a former colleague joined as co-owner after a significant project win validated the business was ready to scale, the dynamic between them had to evolve.

"He was in my team at my previous firm and I was definitely the boss there. Now we are much more equal in how we approach things. It's much more peer-to-peer rather than boss to employee. And I love that."

The team - currently an even split of three women and three men - works flexibly, built around trust rather than rigid hours. Core working times were introduced recently to add some structure, but the underlying philosophy is the same: people do better work when they're treated as adults.

Transparency sits at the centre of how Gillian runs things, including around pay. Everyone on the team knows what everyone else earns. When flexible workers came on board, she asked them a direct question: how much do you want to earn, and can I sell you at that rate? They set their own numbers.

"Everybody set their own salaries, really. I'm probably being naive to think that can continue when we get a lot bigger. But the transparency of what people are earning is something I think really helps to close gender pay gaps and it's the right thing to do."

That last part isn't incidental. Gillian has seen the inside of workplaces where pay was opaque by design, where the formula for bonuses was never quite explained, and where she had to interrogate systems herself to understand what she was worth relative to her peers. She left one such role the year the letter came and didn't reflect what she knew she'd generated.

"I needed to go somewhere where my contribution was measured differently."

In her own business, she's chosen differently. And she has strong views on the employment contracts that still, in 2026, include clauses forbidding staff from discussing their salaries with colleagues.

Charge what you're worth and then a little more

Pricing is one of those topics that female founders rarely discuss openly, and Gillian thinks that's part of the problem.

The best piece of advice she received this year came when she didn't know what to charge for a particular piece of work. She asked someone who knew the field. The answer has stayed with her.

"Think of a number that makes you a bit uncomfortable, and charge that. Because this 10 hours of work is only possible because you've done 20-odd years of honing your skills. They're paying a little bit towards that 20 years of expertise."

It sounds simple. It isn't. For many women, there's a deeply ingrained habit of underpricing - of leaving room, of not wanting to seem like too much. But Gillian's point is that confidence in what you charge isn't arrogance. It's accuracy. You are not just selling your time. You are selling everything that has made your time worth anything at all.

Any forum, she says, that allows those conversations to happen openly - where founders can compare notes on rates, on what the market bears, on what they've learned to ask for - is doing something genuinely useful.

What the best communities actually give you

Earlier this year, Gillian completed an accelerator  program designed to help businesses get ready for investment. She didn't go in looking for investment. She went in looking for knowledge.

"It was one of the best gifts I could have given myself as a female founder. It filled so many knowledge gaps - things I didn't know I didn't know. You don't really know the unknown unknowns until you're there and you go, 'Oh wow, I wish I'd known this a month ago.'"

Data storage, cybersecurity, employment contracts, business operations, the practical infrastructure of running a company, not just delivering work. All of it covered. All of it, in her view, things every founder needs but that largely live inside accelerator programmes, inaccessible to the people who need them earliest.

There's also something that no curriculum can fully replicate: the experience of being in a room with other women who are figuring it out at the same time. The cohort she went through the programme with still has an active WhatsApp group. Wins get celebrated. Setbacks get aired. Someone always knows someone who can help.

"The female network is a lot more collaborative, a lot more supportive of each other. I've never seen an equivalent of that level of lifting each other in any mixed or predominantly male network."

That's the space she thinks LeadHer can occupy: not another networking group, but a real community where female founders can access knowledge, find peers, and stop feeling like they're navigating uncharted territory alone.

On confidence, failure and saying yes

Gillian is 55 this year. She has over two decades of professional credibility. She was recently a finalist in the European Women in Construction and Engineering Awards - something she almost didn't put herself forward for, and then did anyway, reasoning that there was nothing to lose.

"What mattered wasn't whether I was shortlisted. What mattered was that I felt like I could be in that room. Five or ten years ago, I would have said it was a real stretch."

That shift - from I probably don't belong here to why not me - is one that takes time, and experience, and a certain willingness to be uncomfortable. Gillian doesn't think confidence is something you either have or you don't. She thinks it's something you build, failure by small failure, as you prove to yourself that the world doesn't end when things go wrong.

"You can't learn unless you fail. Even if the fail is only a small one. It builds resilience. Not thinking it's the end of the world when something goes wrong is a really important skill to develop."

For anyone sitting on the edge of starting something - weighing up the risk, waiting for the moment to feel right, wondering if they're ready - her advice is the same as the advice she gave herself nearly a year ago.

"Put some money aside before you go. Embrace your network without ego. And give yourself permission to fail at every step because if it doesn't work out, you can just get a job. But give yourself the shot. Invest in yourself. Say yes." - Gillian Murray