Judy Piatkus
Judy Piatkus is a highly regarded publisher and entrepreneur and the author of an award-winning memoir.
Biography
Judy Piatkus grew up in North London. At the age of 11 she won a scholarship to a local girls’ school but at 17 failed to get the grades she needed for the university place she wanted. Undeterred, she gained experience in the publishing industry and went on to launch her own company, Piatkus books, which she sold in 2007. Since then she has gained a Diploma in Psychodynamic Psychotherapy, and achieved an MA in Creative Leadership.
She is now a keynote speaker, an angel investor, and a coach and mentor to many small and medium start-ups. In 2011 she founded ConsciousCafe, a network which now has several branches, and which brings people together for connection and conversation.
Books
Ahead of Her Time
Her memoir AHEAD OF HER TIME is about her extraordinary journey as an entrepreneur. She did not come from a monied background and began her career as a secretary after failing to achieve a university place. By the time she founded Piatkus Books from her spare bedroom, she was married with a disabled small daughter and pregnant with her second child. Gradually she learned how to be both a publisher and a managing director and to combine that with her family life as she had become a single mother of three. A lot of mistakes were made, but she also got a lot of things right. The company prospered, thanks to the risks Judy took in tackling new subjects in the marketplace and also her approach to running the company, which focused on transparency, honesty and trust and was rewarded by the loyalty of the staff, many of whom worked alongside Judy for upwards of twenty years.
Throughout the book Judy describes her learning experience as an entrepreneur, what it really means to run a company, the many triumphs and the pitfalls, what worked and what didn’t, how the company learned to reinvent itself through lean times and how it felt finally to strike gold.