Women bosses are best

According to a survey published earlier this week, women make better bosses than men: they are not only inspiring, but more open to ideas and change. Sahar Hashemi, 34, agrees. "Women are more naturally intuitive than men and better at juggling tasks," she smiles. She should know. At 27, Sahar quit her lucrative career as a lawyer and, along with her brother, Bobby, launched Coffee Republic, Britain's first American-style coffee bar.

They went on to open another 109 branches, helping turn Britain into a nation of skinnylatte addicts, and become millionaires in the process. "I was more in tune with the right side of my brain," she continues, "the one with the ideas, while my brother was the logical one."

Now she's written a guide aimed at women on how to set up a business. "It will be especially helpful for women who have a family and want a career," she continues rapidly. "Being an entrepreneur allows you to choose your working hours. When you work in a big corporation, they decide what hours you work and this can make climbing the career ladder harder. Being a founder of a company allowed me to be master of my own schedule."

Many of her female friends she met studying law have, she says, given up their careers to "I really admire people like Jo Malone, Anya Hindmarch and Nigella Lawson," she adds. "All of them have children and their own businesses. They are the new breed of entrepreneur; they are the new glamour - women with a brain, women who do something."

When we meet at Coffee Republic in Hanover Street, Sahar is certainly looking new glamour. The sheer energy of the woman is exhausting. She also talks at breakneck speed: "My brother always tells me to slow down. It really annoys me as I just can't," she laughs. She keeps her legs tightly crossed, as if left to their own devices they might run out the door, seeking a new entrepreneurial venture. Perhaps it's the coffee.

We're only a few minutes' walk from South Molton Street, where she and Bobby, 39 (and Geri Halliwell's former boyfriend), opened their first branch in November 1995.

It was exactly a year on from when the siblings first hatched the idea over a Thai curry, after Sahar complained how much she missed the skinny lattes she'd enjoyed in New York (she'd often visited Bobby while he was working as a banker on Wall Street).

During those first 12 months, 22 banks rejected their pleas for funding. The company eventually got off to a shaky start, with customers slow to take to cinnamon cappuccinos, but in 1997 they went public, and Sahar was the talk of the City. Sahar says her father, Mehdi Hashemi, an oilcompany executive, would have been proud.

The drive to put their plan into action stemmed from his unexpected death in 1993. Sahar had been part of a tightly-knit, affluent London family of four and her father's death, aged 62, hit her hard. "It made us realise that life's too short not to love what you do."

Despite their success, Sahar and Bobby decided to step down as directors in April 2001. She shrugs: "I'm better at being creative than a manager." Sahar's decision was helped by the fact that she repeatedly clashed with the new male managing director, on everything from the change in coffee blend, to getting rid of classical music in the shops.

Interestingly, profits at Coffee Republic have plunged since her departure and Bobby has since returned to help turn its fortunes around.

She likens leaving Coffee Republic to a bereavement: "As a founder your soul never leaves the company you created." Sahar was soon desperately bored. "It was a very weird time," she recalls. "Especially that first morning, realising I had nothing to get up for."

That's when she had the idea for the book. Once she had made her decision, she went about finding a publisher with the same tenacity with which she'd launched Coffee Republic. "I'm not a patient person," she explains earnestly. "I got myself a big literary agent, did a book proposal, but then nothing happened. I rang my agent and said, 'You know I want things done yesterday'.

"Then I rang Geri Halliwell's literary agent," she continues. "He said, 'Lets talk after Christmas'. It was only early November. So I bought the Writer's Handbook and rang every publisher. Within hours I'd organised 15 interviews and by Christmas there were five offers on the table."

That was last year. The book, now finished, and dedicated to the memory of her father, is entitled, Anyone Can Do It: Building Coffee Republic From Our Kitchen Table, and gives Sahar's "57 real-life laws" for other budding entrepreneurs. She wrote it in just four months: "I was consumed," she continues. "Even when I went on holiday to the south of France, by mid-morning I was inside working."

She is single and therefore, unlike the working mothers she writes for, doesn't have many family responsibilities to encroach on her time.

"I want to get married," she says. "I do still go on dates." In the past, people have suggested that she might have lost out on the chance of having a family because of her career. "Don't you hate that! Today, 30 is the new 20. People are living longer and marrying later.

"It is such an opinion of the Eighties that a career will ruin your chances of a happy family. How can people still be thinking like that? And being an entrepreneur is the perfect solution for women, especially with the internet, so you can work from home."

Does she think she could have coped with launching Coffee Republic if she had been juggling her business with children? She pauses only briefly. "Yes, totally. You just need to plan better - both financially and time-wise. When I have kids, I won't stop working, I'll just slow down a bit." Somehow, I doubt it.

Anyone Can Do It is in the bookshops now (Capstone Publishing Limited, £14.99).