Women In Wellness: Nicola Cleaver of Quality Sport Holiday Clubs On The Five Lifestyle Tweaks That Will Help Support People’s Journey Towards Better Wellbeing
An Interview With Candice Georgiadis
Set out a plan, include short and long term goals and give yourself deadlines to achieve them by. Some plans may change and deviate but make sure you reach the end goal and then set more goals and targets and deadlines.
As a part of my series about women in wellness, I had the pleasure of interviewing Nicola Cleaver.
Nicola Cleaver is on a mission to make sure as many children as possible are being fed and engaging in fun activities during the school holidays. This is driven by her passion to ensure all children are given the same opportunities regardless of their background and circumstances. Having worked in the private children’s activities sector for 15 years only offering paid provisions she is determined to make sure her company is serving all of the community and not just those who can afford to access it.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Our readers would love to “get to know you” better. Can you share your “backstory” with us?
My entry into the world of entrepreneurship wasn’t in the business I am now in. In 2006 I founded a dance school with a couple of friends. It began as a side-line business with everyone involved still working full time and teaching at night from church halls and community centres. Within a couple of years, business was booming and that’s when I decided to leave my day job in the family business to concentrate more on the growing dance business and offer a summer club during the school holidays. In 2009 we opened a state-of-the-art dance studio in Bury and bought out another dance school in Radcliffe. With over 1,000 pupils between the two sites, we then moved the Radcliffe studios to bigger premises in 2014. During this time, the business also got into working in schools offering their sports provision and we expanded our holiday club provision too. In 2018 we split the business and that’s when I took the holiday club arm of the business and from then to now, we have grown from 2 sites to 10 sites and more than quadrupled our turnover.
My initial intention was to keep the business fairly small and work it around family life due to having young children at the time, but demand saw me take a different path and my desire to help those who needed extra support took over. We were serving hundreds and hundreds of children, but it quickly became apparent to me that many of the children who attended the schools we are based in weren’t accessing the provision we provided during the holidays, and it was apparent it was only serving those who had money. This is when I made it my mission to secure funding to enable us to facilitate these children who I felt we were failing.
Along with Quality Sport Holiday Clubs I also run a dance events company where we run dance competitions for children from different dance schools to come together to compete against each other. We run 6 x 1-day events and 2 x full weekend events per year. We have schools travelling from all over the UK to compete with us and regularly sell out 600–800 places at our events. I am driven by seeing children enjoy life and use sport as a way of finding fulfilment and all my businesses have had this driver.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started your career? What were the main lessons or takeaways from that story?
Once I made it my mission to secure funding to enable children from all backgrounds to access our provisions, I started to explore options and applied for community grants but to no avail, failing due to being a limited company and not a charity. We continued to expand due to the demand for paid provision, first into Chorley where I now live and where my children attend school, then into Bolton but I kept coming back to the need for us to be open to all not just those who could afford it.
I contacted everyone I thought could help, the councils, the local MP’s, head teachers — anyone who would listen to my story. In May 2021 Bury Council contacted me regarding the government roll out of the HAF programme (Holiday & Activity Food Fund) and asked Quality Sport Holiday clubs to be a provider. At this point I had no idea what the HAF fund was but after a little research found this was exactly the funding we needed to ensure that we could offer places to all children regardless of family circumstances. Of course, I wanted to partner on this — it was what I had been searching for, for over a year. Shortly after Bury council contacted me, I was also contacted by Chorley and Bolton councils to partner with them on the programme too. In Summer 2021 we delivered our first ever HAF Programme across 4 sites via 3 councils.
It was a huge success and immensely rewarding. We learnt a lot as a business and provider and tailored our offering to suit everyone, employing a SENCO for the first ever time and applying for 1:1 funding so we could offer that level of care too — something we had never done before and knew very little about but knew we needed to do in order to serve the children in our care in the best possible way.
My focus had been on securing the funding but now we actually had it we had to adapt quickly as a business and ensure we were delivering the best possible service to our new customers. We had to change systems and booking processes to suit families better, we had to employ specialist staff and change the structure of the day. This was all in a fairly small window of time too (about 8 weeks from being approved to actually delivering the project).
The main lessons I learnt from this are to never give up on your mission, be willing to adapt your business model in order to enable more people to access you and know that the hard work actually starts once you get the go ahead for your new ‘mission’ but I can guarantee the reward is 100% worth it.
It has been said that our mistakes can be our greatest teachers. Can you share a story about a mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
If you are going into business with others, make sure you have an up-front conversation regarding the process you agree on if any of you would like to exit the business. Even if you are going into business with friends, it is good to have a contract in place and a shareholder’s agreement to give you all peace of mind. Circumstances change and protecting yourself and the business from the forefront is important. I went through this experience 4 years ago and as we had nothing formal in place it did get a little messy however these are all learning curves of business and in the last 4 years the portion of the business I took has grown significantly, likewise with the areas of the business my ex-business partners took. I feel this is because we are now all focused on one area of the business and can grow that how we want to with sole focus on our own field of expertise rather than taking on too many different job roles over multiple areas.
Let’s jump to our main focus. When it comes to health and wellness, how is the work you are doing helping to make a bigger impact in the world?
In Summer 2022 Quality Sport Holiday Clubs ran 8 provisions (3 in Chorley, 3 in Bury, 1 in Bolton and 1 in Oldham), reaching approx. 650 children, through the Government supported HAF programme. Not only did this mean that 650 children we previously couldn’t reach were engaging in fun sporting activities it also enabled us to provide 10,000 lunches to children who may not have been fed had they not come to us.
I am really keen for Quality Sport Holiday Clubs to continue to deliver the HAF programme, expanding to reach even more regions, we have company expansion in sight for 10 locations in place by the end of the year, 15 for 2023 and 20 sites for 2024. We are also in talks with a Special Educational Needs (SEN) school to offer provision there next year too.
Can you share your top five “lifestyle tweaks” that you believe will help support people’s journey towards better wellbeing? Please give an example or story for each.
Exercise — Take time to yourself to exercise for both the body and mind (be selfish if you must but prioritise time to exercise)
Eat wisely — Chose your food wisely to help nourish the body and mind however also incorporate things you like or enjoy to eat into your diet to help maintain a healthy relationship with food
Hobbies — Have a hobby that you enjoy, giving you that crucial ‘me’ time doing something you love
Work — Do something that fulfils you and makes you want to get out of bed in the morning
Family — Make time for your family, prioritise family time, make memories and enjoy each other’s company
If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of wellness to the most amount of people, what would that be?
‘Wellness’ should be a main focus for schools. Being sat behind a desk ‘learning’ for 6 hours, in my opinion isn’t teaching our kids varied life skills. I am a huge supporter of the education system and teachers, but I do think sport should feature more in the curriculum — in fact everyday children should take part in some sort physical activity when in school. Not only is it good for their bodies but their minds too and their willingness to learn/get on task after physical exercise will increase. I appreciate that we all need to learn to read and write etc that is without question but what about teaching children the importance of keeping their minds and bodies healthy and making wellness a habit for life by instilling it in children from a young age?
What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Started” and why?
- Set out a plan, include short and long term goals and give yourself deadlines to achieve them by. Some plans may change and deviate but make sure you reach the end goal and then set more goals and targets and deadlines.
- Believe in yourself and trust your instinct — if something doesn’t feel right it probably isn’t. Turning opportunities/projects down isn’t always a bad thing.
- Use your business to do good in your community, take responsibility for what is going on around your business and incorporate it in your business to make change, have social impact and to grow your business.
- Take up space in your industry, make yourself known, become the expert (go to person) in your field and shout this from the roof tops, celebrate your own and your company’s wins along the way, all the small wins are leading to the big win.
- Build a team around you that is as passionate about your company as you, who share your company’s values and missions and can allow you work on your business rather than in your business.
Sustainability, veganism, mental health, and environmental changes are big topics at the moment. Which one of these causes is dearest to you, and why?
Mental health in children is particularly close to my heart, this was highlighted to me during covid as some of the most vulnerable children were isolated with no school, no outside activities and on some occasions no food. This is when I made it my mission to help these children, which I have, however giving these children activities and food was just scratching the surface and the increase in mental health and anxiety in children became very apparent. Mental wellbeing is now a very prevalent in our holiday club programmes and we work with lots of agencies to ensure we are working together to make sure children are receiving the services they require when in and out of our care.
What is the best way for our readers to further follow your work online?
facebook.com/QualitySportHC
facebook.com/nicola.cleaver
Thank you for these fantastic insights! We wish you continued success and good health.
Women In Wellness: Nicola Cleaver of Quality Sport Holiday Clubs On The Five Lifestyle Tweaks That… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.