Sahar Hashemi founded Coffee Republic, the UK’s first US style coffee bar chain with her brother and built it into one of the UK’s most recognised high street brands with a turnover of £30m. Giving up highly professional jobs, she a lawyer in London and he an investment banker in New York, they staked everything on a dream – and made Coffee Republic one of the main players in the ‘coffee revolution’ that transformed a nation of tea drinkers into one obsessed with ‘triple decaf half-caf lattes’.

Sahar left the day to day management of Coffee Republic in 2001 and wrote a book called ‘Anyone Can Do It – Building Coffee Republic from our Kitchen Table’ which tackles some of the fears and answers some of the elusive questions about what it really takes to become an entrepreneur. It’s a personal story about two people who stopped ‘thinking about it’ and ‘did it’. ‘Anyone Can Do It’ has reached #1 on the Amazon business chart and is second highest selling book on entrepreneurship ever published in the UK.

In 2005 Sahar founded Skinny Candy, a brand of guilt free sweets, again from her kitchen table, inspired by her sweet tooth. Skinny Candy quickly become a hit with fashionistas, named ‘hip confectonery brand’ by Vogue, on the Vanity fair A list and hailed by glossy magazines from Tatler to Grazia. She secured distribution with Waitrose, Holland & Barrett, Topshop and Selfridges before in was sold to confectionery conglomerate, Glisten plc in 2007.

Her latest book ‘Switched On’ came about after requests from many of her speaking clients. Having forged a successful speaking career, talking to international blue chip companies and conferences about innovation, creativity, branding and the entrepreneurial mindset, she found that she could apply the learnings from her experiences in the business world and her first book, Anyone Can Do It, to the corporate sphere. That entrepreneurs and employees were not in fact two separate species but, if operating effectively and with focus, shared many similar traits.

It was these traits that she set about explaining to her audiences. That the excitement of meeting new challenges at work every day was not the sole preserve of the entrepreneur; that the employee was empowered to control their own career trajectory and ultimately that of their company too. The companies Sahar addressed wanted her to explain to their employees that this enthusiasm and excitement was there just waiting to be exploited.

Response to Sahar’s speeches has been universally positive and clients said time and again that they wished there could be some kind of ‘take away’ that employees could use to reinvigorate that enthusiasm that Sahar had awoken in them in the conference hall. Initially, many fell on her first book which, though containing many valuable business lessons, didn’t focus on the employee experience. And so Switched On was born.

Switched On is the sum of Sahar’s experience as an entrepreneur, the learnings from her speaking tours and her interactions with business and lifestyle leaders. She has drawn from personal experience as an employee as well as understanding what it is like to be an employer. As a result, she understands the pressures from both sides of the fence. Sahar understands employers’ imperatives and motivations, as well as employees’ desires and limitations. This means that all the advice in Switched On is eminently actionable, by anyone, in any organisation.