I almost lost my first client when a nanny didn’t show

DANA DENIS-SMITH, 40, FOUNDER & CEO OF OBELISK SUPPORT

DANA is mum to five-year-old Alma Constance and married to John, 45, a barrister. AGED six, Dana Denis-Smith began to do the family shopping after school. ‘I was good with money early on,’ she says. ‘I’d always manage it so I could put some sweets in the basket at the end!’

This was the early Eighties in poverty-stricken rural Romania, where Dana was born. ‘My father wanted his daughters to do better. He was very clear about that: he wanted us to find a way out.’

Today, at 40, Dana lives a life even her father, who died last year, could barely imagine for her.

A lawyer festooned with awards, she runs a legal business with a turnover ‘well into seven figures’, and lives in London.

Dana came to London 22 years ago on a scholarship with Reuters news agency.

After studying history at the London School of Economics and earning her degree in just two years, she switched to law and ended up as a trainee with one of the City’s biggest firms, Linklaters.

It was there she realised how few women made it to the top of the profession and got the inkling of a business idea.

‘It wasn’t conscious discrimination so much as a failure to change the way things had always been done,’ she says. ‘Men were expected to become partners in a legal firm and women weren’t.’

Plus, as she soon found, women tended to leave the industry when they had children, finding the inflexible, long hours impossible to manage.

To Dana, this seemed not only unfair, but inefficient. ‘A huge pool of talent was going to waste.’ So, in 2010, while pregnant, she set up Obelisk Support, which outsources legal work to women who’ve left City careers to raise children, allowing them to keep practising law from their kitchen table, in the hours they choose.

But it almost didn’t happen. When her business was about to get its first big client, investment bank Goldman Sachs, her nanny let her down. Dana’s husband rushed back — allowing her to get to the meeting with seconds to spare.

Nowadays, Dana pitches for work, then assembles her mum-lawyers according to their expertise. With ten full-time staff in London, Obelisk takes a 25 per cent cut of money earned and manages an app via which mums can tell Dana when they’re available.

Her plan is to ‘pipe it out into the countryside to tap an even bigger pool of mum-talent’.

‘Why should we pay a penalty for dedicating a few years to bringing up the next generation?’ she says.

‘This way, women can keep earning and, if they choose, go back to the big firms later.’