42 Degrees - Business from a different angle

Fast forward three decades, and Harrison, 44, is chairman of a revolutionary company with a turnover of more than £100m, 2,800 employees and a remarkable philosophy.

She has also starred in two Channel 4 business reality programmes. So how did she and A4e ("Action for Employment"), the company she built from scratch, achieve such success?

Some time ago, Harrison – an unconventional businesswoman who lives in a "commune" with her husband, four children and 20 friends on a grand Derbyshire estate – sketched out a plan of where she wanted to be five years later. "Do you want to know what I wrote? It was so outrageous that I was embarrassed at first and shut it in a drawer.

It said 'Emma has inspired millions of people around the world to do things they didn't think possible. She has done this by building a company wholly focussed on doing well by doing good – and via her TV and media career.' (At the time, she was a complete unknown.)

Doing well by doing good? "Basically I'm in the business of improving people's lives," she says. A4e manages over £300m of public sector and European funding annually, using the cash to help the long-term unemployed off benefits and into work. But, says Harrison, profit maximisation will never be the sole goal of the firm she founded in 1991. "I've got one life to live and I want to live it in a way that's done some good."

She started her career working for her father's company, which also provided services for the long-term unemployed. But the experience left a sour taste in her mouth. "It was a bums-on-seats organisation. The government was paying us for the process rather than for the outcome. But I wanted to be paid for the good we were doing – not for putting somebody through a sausage machine."

So, having failed to change the company's outlook from within, Harrison "effectively left on a Friday and started up on my own on a Monday. It was incredibly scary. It had taken two years to pluck up the courage to do this and to persuade my dad that I really was going to leave unless we changed the whole nature of the organisation. What I started was A4e, with one vision – improving people's lives. And from that minute onward, I would only negotiate with government for contracts on the basis of results."

A4e works with some of the most challenged and socially excluded members of society. So what can it do for them? "It's as varied as the people are varied," says Harrison. "When they come to us, we work out what the barrier is that's preventing them going out to work. It could be drugs, depression, their self-esteem, family problems. We'll then do whatever it takes to move a person on. And then we will be paid once we've achieved that.

"We've done everything from paying for a haircut, to teaching someone how to keep clean, to flying someone to the other side of the world to get a guaranteed job we knew they'd be good at.

"There's one girl I remember – she was a climbing champion, but she was on benefit because all she wanted to do was climb. Well my lot – I'm so proud of them – paid for her to do a rope access course, and now she swings off buildings in London removing birds' nests from skyscrapers and she earns an absolute fortune." Harrison's promise is that A4e will help clients even if a more ruthless approach to costs would suggest turning a blind eye to need. "That course probably cost us £10,000. But the next person through the door might just need a kind word."

If such an approach means that A4e's profits – £3m last year – are reduced in the short term, so be it, argues Harrison. In any case, in the long term, "this approach is superb for business. We went from £3m turnover to £35m in four years. Now it's £102m. Everybody likes us because we say what we stand for and we deliver on it."

Little wonder that when Channel 4 was looking for an inspirational businesswoman to appear in two reality programmes – Make Me a Millionaire, and The Secret Millionaire – they turned to Harrison. She was also approached to become a dragon in the BBC's Dragons' Den, but declined – "I will not," she explains, "sit there and humiliate someone who is desperately trying to get on in the world."

Yet she can be tough when she needs to be. Or when she is angered by injustice or anything she perceives as arrogance. The other day she was sent a legal contract to look over by a firm of lawyers she'd employed to help put together a complicated deal for A4e.

"I scanned it and this bloody lawyer, who cost us a fortune, had left some Latin in the contract." Harrison, who attended her local comprehensive school and left after making a "terrible mess" of her A-levels, was appalled. "How dare they use pompous Latin in something that we need to understand? I didn't study Latin at my school – and neither did most people. I said: 'Sack 'em. Just get rid of them. We will not use that law firm again.'"

Why was her reaction so extreme? Because by confusing the issue, she felt the lawyer was getting in the way of her central mission. It's back to "doing well by doing good" again. "I'd paid him to give me something that I can understand," she explains, "so I can know whether I am doing the best for my people."