"Go on then, pitch me"

Alison Cork MBE floated a company at 29, built a lifestyle brand across two continents, and lost 30 kilos in her late fifties. At 63 she is running a snack business out of a gym cafe. She talks to Clanmark about trust, second acts and why she does not believe in luck.

On a hot Friday in July last year, Alison Cork ran across Hyde Park. Her son had texted to say Richard Branson was standing in the Mayfair branch of Virgin Active. She arrived soaked through, was turned away by his assistant, and waited. When the room briefly turned its back, she walked up to him and said she had about twenty seconds before someone pulled her off.

She had no company, no packaging and no brand name. She had a recipe for a chocolate orange date ball.

Ten months later LEKA LEKA launched in Kauai cafes inside Virgin Active gyms across the country. Ten weeks after that it had become one of their best selling snacks. It is the fourth or fifth act of a career that has taken in mail order publishing, ITV, American shopping television, interiors and a decade of work getting women into business, for which she was appointed MBE in 2023.

We spoke to her because the thing she has been quietly good at for thirty five years is the thing we think about every day: persuading people to trust someone they have never met.

I went on a personal health journey. I was a food critic earlier in my life, and a television cook, and I have always loved food. But by my late fifties I was about 30 kilos overweight. I looked in the mirror one day and thought, Alison, if you do not knock this on the head now, it is game over.

I went to a nutritionist and a strength training gym and they told me the truth, which was that they could train me until I dropped to the floor but if I did not fix my food I would never lose the weight. My diet was about 95 per cent carbohydrate. I cut refined and added sugar out of my life entirely. The 30 kilos went. I started lifting weights. I wrote a book about it, and because food is never far from my mind I put 46 recipes with no added sugar in the back of it. One of them was the date ball.

He did not flinch. He looked me straight in the eye and said, well, go on then, pitch me.

I had a recipe in my head and nothing else. He said he liked it, that we all need to eat less added sugar, and he introduced me on the spot to his marketing team. They asked me to come back in two weeks. In those two weeks I built the brand, the name, the packaging and three more flavours. A week after that pitch they emailed to say they loved the product, that I had absolutely no retail experience, which was a bit problematic, but that if I could get it retail ready by April 2026 they would sell it. In my complete innocence I said, of course I can.

Most people take two years. I had to find a manufacturer, get the nutritional claims legally accurate and work out shelf life, which is a very long way from making them in your kitchen for your friends. In the end a tiny manufacturer in Northern Ireland was the only one willing to take a chance on a complete novice.

"What people call luck is really opportunity. Recognising it immediately, and grabbing it."

The statistics say something very different. Women over 50 are the fastest growing group of entrepreneurs in the UK, and the reason is quite logical. Your children may have just left home, which is emotional, but it gives you time. You may be thinking about going back to work, and the unpleasant reality is that the workplace does not value women in their fifties as it should. So you have maturity, depth of experience, possibly some money of your own to invest, and a world that is not interested.

You also reach a stage where a part of you stops caring what people think. If you have raised children you can handle most problems. So women get to that point and think, blow this for a ball game, it is not over and I will do it myself.

I loved that business precisely because of that. It is a huge leap of faith. What we did was remove the fear. Every book came with a lifetime money back guarantee, no questions. We did not care if the dog had been sick on it, if you had spilled coffee on it, or if you had read it cover to cover and simply wanted your money back because it was a Monday.

The moment you say that, everybody's shoulders drop. The risk has gone.

Less than half a per cent. Because we had engaged their trust, which removed the fear, and once the fear is gone there is nothing to worry about.

In my case I am a person led brand. My story and my consistency are the product, and consistency is the important word there. If you look at what I have actually done across my career it has been one theme throughout, which is lifestyle. Television in the eighties and nineties, being the British Martha Stewart. Gardening on the radio. Cooking. Interiors on QVC and HSN in America. Now food again. All of it is the same world.

I met a 25 year old on Mount Toubkal in Morocco who said, what, the Alison Cork? I said you cannot possibly have seen the programme, you were not born. He said no, but my mother never stops talking about you. That is what longevity buys you.

The comparison with 1992, when I was running the publishing company, is stark. There was no social media. We built that business on the words we wrote in press advertisements. Now there are billions of people competing for attention, fake news, AI. It is vastly harder for a consumer to work out whose voice to trust. So being authentic, having been around a long time, being known, and having good things said about you by other people are absolutely key.

There is one major difference, and it may be particularly female. Put only women in a room who want to talk about starting a business and their willingness to articulate fear goes up dramatically. They will say what they do not feel capable of doing. In a mixed room, when someone asks for questions from the floor, they often will not raise a hand at all.

Exactly. There is a related dynamic around money. Women do not get as much investment, partly because they are not as good at asking for it. They start smaller businesses, lean on angel and friends and family money, move more slowly and cautiously, make fewer mistakes, and statistically they are more likely to succeed and to produce better returns. It is a fascinating by product.

The obvious answer is Branson, but the lesson underneath it matters more. A mentor once told me never to mess around in middle management. Always go up. You can always come down again, but you cannot go up. If Richard Branson introduces you to his global head of marketing and says, I want you to meet Alison, she has something rather interesting, that person is not going to say no.

And if someone does say no, so what. You have lost almost nothing. We spent months recently trying to reach a buyer at a chain of outlets. We went at him on LinkedIn, worked out his email address, turned up in branches, tried every platform available. Eventually he sent a very long email which amounted to begging us to stop. The last line offered us fifteen minutes in September. Thank you very much, I thought. That is all I wanted.

"Do not mess around in middle management. Always go up. You can always come down, but you cannot go up."

A buyer recently asked how big my team was, and I said, you are looking at it. The truth is that I subcontract to best of breed. The only real idea I had was that, being a greedy girl, I wanted a chocolate orange date ball with no added sugar. Everything else I have bought in. Nutritionists who have saved me from a series of pitfalls. Good lawyers for the intellectual property. A manufacturer at exactly the right point in its own journey to scale alongside me. None of them is on my payroll, which means I can cherry pick from the world's talent.

I have run companies with thirty people and you spend an enormous amount of your time on people. I am impatient. It is no fun to feel your feet are set in concrete because you are sorting out an HR problem when all you want to do is get a new flavour out of the door.

Gerald Ratner. A hugely successful jewellery business on every British high street, and one attempt at a joke in front of an audience about how little his products cost and how briefly they might last. That single moment destroyed the company. It never recovered and arguably nor did he. Hubris, carelessness and misplaced humour. Devastating, and irretrievable.

Not only can they, they should. One of the great lies of social media is that everyone else's life is better than yours. It is edited and filtered and it is not true, and people are far wiser to that than they were five years ago.

I want my community to feel I know more than they do, otherwise why would they ask me. But not so much more that I am unreachable. I always want people to feel that if they stretch out a hand just a little, they could touch. If they think I am somewhere far away over there, they will not connect with me at all. Failure, realism and honesty are part of that. Otherwise you are selling them a lie.

To Debbie Wait, who has energy fizzing out of every pore, and who I would very much like credited. You might found something, but you do not necessarily need to keep it under your control forever. That limits its growth and it limits what anybody else can bring to it.

It also matters that I have started something new, and it is utterly all consuming. People should understand this before they begin. A second act needs energy and physical stamina, and you have to be obsessed. I live, breathe and dream LEKA LEKA. It is all I think about. If you are not obsessed at that level you are hampering your own chances. It is not a part time occupation.

I do not really believe in luck. Every time I think I have been lucky I realise I made it. If I had not run across that park sweating like a warthog last July there would be no LEKA LEKA. What people call luck is really opportunity. Recognising it immediately, and grabbing it.

There is, and I cannot tell you what it is. I can say it is a lovely full circle moment. It will not happen this year but it will happen, and it has been waiting about 25 years to happen. If you had told me 25 years ago I would be doing it now I would have said, not possible, I will be too old, nobody will be interested, and I will not look or feel confident enough. Having rewired my own second act, I feel not only that I can, but that this is exactly the right moment.

Alison's mother is 93 and still, in her daughter's words, articulate, slim and healthy. "I am 63 in a few days. So I could have a good thirty years ahead of me. When you think of it that way, that is a lot of time."

For Clanmark readers: Alison is putting together a bundle of Fit & Fabulous Over 50 with a LEKA LEKA discovery pack, at a discount for our members. Details to follow in the next edition.