Sarah Abel
Award winning serial entrepreneur. Founder and CEO of TNB Skills Training. Author of The Power of Funding. Finalist, Services Entrepreneur of the Year, Great British Entrepreneur Awards 2026.
Thirty years in the hair and beauty industry. Salons built, grown and sold, and a training academy of my own. More than £8.5m of government funding secured to develop other people's teams.
I train teams to run the business, so the owner does not have to.
I work with owner led businesses that are trying to grow and finding the work is there but the people to do it properly are not.
We train the people you already employ, we find the government funding that pays for it, and we do the paperwork.
Four things together to accelerate growth
- 1The right team.
- 2Processes that do not live in one person's head.
- 3AI doing the jobs that eat everybody's week.
- 4And funded training to pay for all of it.
That is how you scale without growing your headcount at the same rate.
I bought a nail salon on a whim and I had no idea what I was doing.
I left school at sixteen. A string of jobs after that, and eventually I ended up a top Avon manager training thousands of reps. That is where I found out I could teach.
In 2001 I bought a nail salon for £20,000 with a start up loan, already deep in debt. I had never run one in my life. I learned it, and it turned a profit.
Then I kept training my staff and kept losing them. I was paying for it out of my own pocket and watching it walk out of the door. Then I found out the government would have covered it, and nobody had ever told me.
So I opened my own training academy. I sold the salons after Covid, and this became the whole job.
Funding is your own tax coming back to you.
What I believeNot a handout, and not charity.
Funders do not fund potential. They fund the prepared.
Three things stop owners getting it, and none of them are the business. Nobody told you. You think you are too small. It feels too complicated.
"You don't need to be a tech company, or under thirty, to put AI to work."
No business is too small, and no owner is too old.
The Power of Funding.
Nobody handed me a book like this when I was starting. So I wrote the one I needed.
Sarah writes weekly on Substack about growth, funding and building a business that runs without you, and posts on LinkedIn most weeks.
Sarah speaks on
- Running a business and adopting AI at 61
- Why no business is too small and no owner too old for AI
- Growing without growing headcount
- Securing government funding
- Building a business that runs without you
"I'm not going to lie to you and tell you it's going to be easy."
But I will tell you honestly whether the funding is there and what it is worth.