Mpower officially began in 2013, but if I'm truthful, the story started much earlier than that, long before I became a business mentor, wrote The Invisible Revolution or gave a TEDx talk, and long before the awards, the programmes and the thousands of conversations with women building businesses of their own.

It started with a bet I made with my university friends.

"I'll never get married and I'll never have children."

Not because I didn't like children. Because I was ambitious. I loved business and I wanted a big career, and somewhere along the way I'd absorbed an idea that felt completely logical at the time: I couldn't have both. A serious career and motherhood simply didn't seem compatible. I had no idea that the question underneath that assumption would follow me for decades.

How do we honour motherhood and our ambition without asking one to disappear for the other?

Then I became a mum.

By twenty-four I'd spectacularly lost the bet. I had married, become a mother and was building a successful career in business consulting, and something surprised me. I loved them both. I loved being a mum and I loved my work.

I was ambitious, progressing quickly, managing large projects and teams in a predominantly male environment and eventually becoming the main breadwinner for our family. From the outside it looked as though I'd proved my younger self wrong. But I hadn't yet understood the difference between having both and building a life in which both could genuinely matter. That lesson would come later, and painfully.

When success stopped feeling like success

In my early thirties I walked away from my corporate career and joined my then-husband in building a restaurant business in the South of France. From the outside it sounded rather idyllic: a successful family business, living together, working together, seeing more of the children.

Except I discovered something I've never forgotten. Seeing my family wasn't the same as being with them.

The business was financially successful, but I was overwhelmed, frustrated and increasingly depleted, and when I was physically with my children there was often very little of me left to give them. Eventually I burned out. That changed my understanding of success forever, because for the first time I understood that a business can work and the life around it can still not work.

That truth became one of the foundations of Mpower.

Life changed again. And again.

The years that followed took our family around the world. I worked, led, built businesses and kept trying to understand what it meant to create professional fulfilment alongside a life that actually felt like mine.

Then, in 2010, my seventeen-year marriage ended. I returned to the UK with my children and started again, and somewhere in that rebuilding, something I'd been circling for years became clear. I wanted to use everything I'd learned, professionally and personally, to support other women navigating these same questions.

So I trained as a transformational coach alongside my business background. I began working with women in 2012, and in 2013 CEO Mums was born.

CEO Mums

CEO stood for Cherish Every Opportunity, not Chief Executive Officer. CEO Mums began with women navigating both entrepreneurship and careers, but before long the entrepreneurial community took on a life of its own, and CEO Mums evolved into Mpower.

I coached and mentored thousands of women. I wrote The Invisible Revolution specifically for mums in business and gave my TEDx talk, How Mums in Business Is Changing the World. We created the Mpower Awards, celebrating women building remarkable businesses alongside raising families, and Mpower became programmes, communities, conversations, friendships and businesses that changed women's lives. And all the while, I was learning too.

Thirteen years later

My children are grown now, and I've recently entered another extraordinary chapter of this story. I'm a grandmother.

There is something profoundly moving about watching your child become a parent, seeing another generation begin and discovering that motherhood doesn't finish when our children grow up. It changes shape. I'm still a mum, I'm now a grandmother, and I'm still a woman building, creating, working and learning what matters to me.

That's given me an even longer view of the question that has sat beneath Mpower from the beginning. The way we live, work, love and raise our children doesn't end with us. Our children grow up watching what we make important, and if we're fortunate, one day we find ourselves watching them make their own choices about family, work, love and ambition. That matters to me more now than it ever has.

Which brings me back to Mpower.

Over the years my work expanded beyond mums in business. Women came to me for leadership development, coaches came for specialist business mentoring, organisations invited me in, and because my wider work didn't yet have another Home, Mpower stretched to hold almost all of it. That has changed. My wider work now has its own Home at nicolahuelin.com, my work with women leaders sits within The Leadership Oasis®, my specialist work with coaches lives at Grow Your Coaching Business and my organisational leadership work continues through Successfactory.

So Mpower gets to come Home too, back to mums who are building businesses. But not back to 2013. Forward, carrying everything we've learned since.

Mpower today

I'm still passionate about building commercially successful businesses, possibly more than ever. Strategy, positioning, marketing, sales and profit all matter, and your business needs to work. But one of the deepest lessons of my own life is that the business working is only part of the picture. I want to help women build businesses that work without losing themselves or the lives they're building them for.

That's the Mpower I want to build now, and it still comes back to the question beneath all of this: how do we honour motherhood and our ambition without asking one to disappear for the other?

Welcome to Mpower.

R E V O L U T I O N

Mpower is more than a movement, it's a revolution.

A revolution of power - where women are reconnecting with their own personal power to achieve their version of success.

The M of  Mpower stands for:

T H E  M P O W E R  W A Y

Mpower supports & celebrates the revolution of

 empowered women across the nation