Back in 2003, Louise Ballard and Lou Webster got chatting at a marketing event.

Both had recently started their own PR businesses and decided to explore the idea of sharing office space - well before co-working spaces became popular.

Shared space meant shared ideas, shared teams and then shared clients and they went on to represent a number of dot.com superstars including Italian fashion retailer YOOX and the pioneering online DVD site Lovefilm.

Eventually they went their separate ways having outgrown the store cupboard space they’d hustled at a Notting Hill marketing agency. They both went on to build and grow successful PR businesses. Louise sold hers to Huntsworth PLC and Lou to Mischief PR and new chapters began.

Fast forward twenty years from their first meeting, a chance connection brought them back together again thanks to Lou’s highly successful Beyondtheschoolrun platform.

Many cups of coffee later, they realised what drove them both was the feeling that a generation of people, often mothers, usually previously highly successful professionals, were simply not getting back into the work place. Not only were they facing the bias of ageism and having had so-called squiggly careers, the skills they had gathered in their years out were not valued. They decided they were going to fix that, and so was born Beyondable….