This is a Pod One production. For more information, visit podone. co. uk. This 

is the Business Village People podcast. Hello, I'm David Markwell and welcome to the Business Village People podcast.  This is episode three of series two. Here we showcase unique stories from the companies, service providers and staff at the Business Village in Balsey, South Yorkshire. Well, if you're ready, let's go! 

In this episode of Business Village People, we meet the mum who was so unimpressed with the quality of face painting her daughter received that she decided to wipe the wonky smile Off her face and do it herself. 14 years later, she's turned face, body and bump painting into a thriving business. We'll hear her story shortly. 

Working alone can be very isolating. That's one of the reasons the business village began its monthly creative collective. A place to share ideas, listen to guests and chat, and we'll get the full story of what happens at a Creative Collective session a  little bit later on. 

Donna Godfrey's business started with a Well, if they can do it, I'm sure I could moment and has since become a thriving venture. A company has achieved so much success that she's even been invited to the United States to train people in the art of face painting. Here's Donna's story. I used to work in finance, so I was doing payroll for, oh my gosh, years.

I just fell into it. But what I'd found was like, I would go into work on a Friday and then I'd be like bouncing around the office going, Yay, the weekend's here. And they were all like, Donna, it's month end, get serious. Do you know what I mean? I was like, I just don't feel like this is my place and I'm not kind of fitting in.

Um, and then  my daughter at the time just was into face painting. So we just queued up everywhere for it. And I thought, how hard is this? And bought a little cheap set and then. It's gone from there. Did she get a really dodgy face painting dump ones? Um, I think it, it varies where you go. Some places should have an hour.

Well, I, I can do better than that. And we hear a lot of these stories with the students that come on my course as well and they get the same thing. They go somewhere and it's a bit naff and they go, how hard is this? I'm gonna give it a go. But then there is some people out there that's absolutely phenomenal.

And like beautiful kind of artwork, so there's a huge variation in what you can kind of get. So what did you want to do when you were at school? When I was, when I was like primary school, I wanted to work at ASDA. That was like the huge aim. For some reason, I don't know why, but watching people kind of scanning, I was like, this is,  We're going back some time.

So like till then we're like high tech. Um, but in high school there was a period of wanting to be a fashion designer, which I never even went into. Um, and I don't, um, thank God I did. Cause I have no idea about fashion now. So, um, I didn't really kind of have anything specific. Um, I just, I did a lot of retail when I left school.

I've worked ever since leaving school though, always worked. Um, so I did a lot of retail, worked at some car garages on receptions. Um, I've even worked in an egg factory. It was like one of my first ever jobs. So I've always worked. Go on then, what were you doing there?  So it was a very thrilling job. Um, it was  weekends and school holidays that I'd do it and I literally had to stand in this like booth with a curtain behind me and then eggs would come over the factory kind of belt and they would go there would be a light underneath and my job was literally to look for cracked eggs and you would pull them out and put them on the shelf if any were cracked and that was all day just doing that. 

Hated it.  But I wanted money. That's all I was bothered about was the money.  Your daughter had come back looking like Charlie Carolli, having her face done. And you thought, I'm gonna, I'm gonna do this meself. What did you do next? So I bought a little, um, Snazaroo set, which everyone can kind of get hold of from What?

Sorry? Snazaroo. Bless you.  You can get them from like, Amazon, um, eBay, uh, some like, the range sells them. It's like the, the main at home kind of face paint that's safe to use. So I'd bought a little set like that. And I'd painted my daughter at home and I painted her as a tiger and it wasn't actually half bad.

It was, it wasn't, it wasn't the best, but it wasn't half bad. But it was more the enjoyment of it. It was, I thoroughly enjoyed painting her and her reaction, Kind of after being done, just, it gives me goosebumps now just talking about it. That's the main part of our job that I love the most, is the kids reactions and even adults reactions.

And it was just, it was, I just loved it. So I thought I'm just going to carry on playing. I went online and then you find there's a massive world of face and body painting that you You know, you wouldn't know unless you were in the industry. So we, I followed a few other people, got a few different tips, just kept practicing.

And then a princess party approached me, like a party company, and said, would you do face painting for us? And I said, well, I'm still very new, and they were like, no, that's perfect. Um, and I did all the parties for them,  and just gradually got better and better, and then eventually was able to kind of do it on a much bigger scale like we are now.

So how big is it at the present? There's only me, but we do subcontract to, gosh, probably over 20 face painters. And it's something that I'm really pleased that we do subcontract, because it still allows a lot of freedom for the subcontractors. So rather than bringing them in, um, kind of on an hourly rate, where it's much lower than what they could kind of get, uh, subcontracting, they can still charge their normal kind of fees to us. 

And it keeps the community kind of together. We're all sharing work, in a sense, and things like that. But there's just me, uh, that kind of does all the admin. And I keep saying I'm going to employ somebody and then I go, no, I'm not going to, because letting go of anything is so hard. So hard. But yeah, so I'll travel up and down the country now as well, doing all the training courses and things.

I might drag a friend along with me now and again so I can enjoy a nice pint at the end of the day. The training course, but that's probably about it. And your training courses are all over the country, aren't they? And, in fact, into Europe as well, aren't they? We haven't gone into Europe yet. I get asked.

I'm asked to do it in America, and I'm asked to do it in Ireland, and there's been a couple in, oh, somewhere in the Netherlands, where. And I need to sit down and try and work about logistics, like, there's a lot of gear that comes with us. It's not like just a couple of face paints. The, I have an estate car and that is rammed when we go on tour.

So it's just figuring out how can I get all this equipment over there cheaply, and still not have, like, to keep the prices low for kind of the training. So it's, it's a possibility, a possibility. Tell us more about the courses that you run. So, I was approached about, about 8 years, 9 years ago, um, by another facepainter who wanted to learn.

And I said, um, yeah, sure, I'll, I'll, I'll show you. And I'd got another lady who'd asked at the same time, so I thought, right, there's two people that want to learn. I wonder if I can get a few more and kind of do it as like a group thing. So I'd asked around a few kind of beginner facepainters I'd seen in the area.

And I think I got a group of about, what was it, six that joined and we hired, um, a room in a pub in Wakefield and set that up and we did this training course. Since then, it's kind of gradually then, we'll, we'll go for another one and we'll try and advertise it. And then people were joining and now people were asking for like Scotland, will you come to Scotland?

Will you come to London? Will you come here? Will you come there? And I was like, well, why not just take it on tour and we'll, we'll cover the whole UK. And so we teach up to 20 people. on a Saturday, 20 people on a Sunday, come home, clean it all, then go off again and teach another 20 on a Saturday somewhere else and we're all over the place.

So how do you teach somebody to face paint? So, um, you have to go through start very basics, uh, with face painting, it's all about line work.  It's a line, if you think of like a face paint, like a tiger design, the tiger stripes kind of on there. If you were to do very thick kind of lines, just very straight lines, it's quite dull and boring.

Whereas what we're teaching is to vary the shapes and sizes of each stroke. So they look kind of thin going to thick, going back to thin again. They might have curves in them, things like that. Um, but it's a A lot of moving of the brush. It's not as simple as what it sounds. So we spend the first half of the class just focusing on that.

One of the good things that we do in our course is at the beginning, I say, um, right, this is how the paints kind of work very quickly. Uh, you've got ten minutes to paint a tiger. So they've got no training whatsoever. They come straight into the course. They're all quite scared because they're in a room with all these other people.

Um, so they have ten minutes. They have to paint a tiger however they think.  And then later in the day we, I teach them how to paint a tiger using the techniques what they've learned. So we have a really good before and after tiger. And the reactions of the people when they do the after one and they put the pictures kind of together, they're like, wow, look what I've done in just a day.

And it is really amazing what they can learn in just a day. And are the prac