Carina Lepore: 'I saw Lord Sugar's car and it was a sign'

In this episode, Anna Jordan meets entrepreneur and The Apprentice 2019 winner, Carina Lepore.

We discuss the law of attraction and starting a business in a field that you're not familiar with.

This episode was brought to you in partnership with UPS and AAT.

You can also visit smallbusiness.co.uk for more on starting your own business. 

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Hello and welcome to Small Business Snippets, the podcast from SmallBusiness.co.uk. I’m your host, Anna Jordan.

Today we have Carina Lepore – entrepreneur and the latest winner of The Apprentice back in 2019.

She’s considered the most successful candidate of all time, winning nine out of ten challenges and never appearing in the bottom two.  

Before she went on the show, Carina joined her dad to start a coffee shop business after his previous bakery burned down. Now Dough Artisan Bakehouse has two branches in London and has plans to take on Greggs.

We’ll be talking about the law of attraction and starting a business in an unfamiliar field. 

Anna: Hi Carina

Carina: Hello

Anna: How are you doing?

Carina: Yeah, good.

Anna: Hi, Carina, how you doing?

Carina: Hi, I'm good. You?

Anna: Yeah, I'm doing well. Enjoying this lovely heatwave after the thunderstorms yesterday.

Carina: I got caught in that!

Anna: Me too. Oh, I know. I know. And you think, is it just going to be sun, shower, sun, shower.

Carina: I know. It was awful.

Okay, so the first thing I want to ask you is a bit about before you joined your dad's bakery business. You had your first business when you were 18? Tell us a bit more about that.

Carina: Yes. So, I left school, left sixth form and I had been working for our small High Street shop, I suppose, and I was really just interested in the ways he ran the business. I would start to, at a very young age, say 14-15, I'd start to ask the right questions, just try and get involved with merchandising and his little takings book and where he would get stock from. I started to want to know more about the ways the business worked, really. So, I had that keen interest and drive at such a young age.

It's obviously A-Level result day [at time of recording] and we've been talking and the main thing I've just keep thinking and saying is that when you get them results, you just think, ‘Oh my God. Is this making or breaking my life?’ I remember that as well – and I remember I didn't get great grades, no, but I still had that entrepreneurial drive. So, I was going do something with that. That was more my route.  

I then went and opened up a shop and I did a shop, car-boot sales and a market – Wimbledon Market. What I would do is I would buy my stock. A lot what Lord Sugar says, and now I can say to him, ‘Smell what sells.’ I would pick top sellers and just bung them in my shops or whatever I had. That was me really. It was bold, it was brave. It was different. It was just something I wanted to do. I was just really excited by it. Yeah, I really enjoyed it.

Great stuff. What was your first business