Sarah Finlay last year graduated from Glasgow University where she studied Geography. Now she is a young entrepreneur after starting her own confectionary company, Miss COCO.
In the last year of her university course, she decided she wanted to become a chocolate maker and start up her own chocolate brand.
This is not the kind of stuff they teach in Geography, so in her spare time she took a course called
Encouraging Dynamic Global Enterprise (EDGE) to gain some business knowledge. She also attended a seminar on the art of chocolate making, as well as reading every chocolate making book under the sun.
She put in a lot of hard work in order to get her dream of having a chocolate brand, making an effort to learn new skills by teaching herself.
Oh yeah and did I mention the 24 year old from Scotland was also crowned Miss Earth Scotland 2009. Well this gave her an opportunity to visit many new places she otherwise may have not been able to, and she tried to infuse her new experiences into her chocolates. It has helped her determine the brand image of Miss COCO (glamorous and luxurious, who would have guessed?).
Her enthusiasm and hard work has led to her being awarded BT Scotland Young E-ntrepreneurs awards scheme which looks at encouraging young entrepreneurs to make use of e-commerce in their start ups.
The sociable scot believes it is an integral part of starting a new business to keep customers updated with on-goings and build a relationship with them.
So good luck to Sarah, in her future as a chocolatier!
