Judy Piatkus, author of Ahead of Her Time: How a One-Woman Startup Became a Global Publishing Brand (Watkins, 2021), was a keynote speaker at this year’s Business Book Awards. Judy is herself a previous winner at the awards, with Ahead of Her Time taking home the 2022 award for Best Business Journey.
Her speech focused on the new opportunities open to us all as the world experiences massive and systemic changes that have been brewing over the past few years. She also discussed her personal business journey, something that can be read about in her memoir Ahead of Her Time.
Ahead of Her Time is an inspiring memoir, detailing how Judy Piatkus became a successful entrepreneur in the world of publishing. Judy Piatkus did not come from a monied background and began her career as a secretary after failing to achieve a university place. By the time she founded Piatkus Books from her spare bedroom, she was married with a disabled small daughter and pregnant with her second child. Gradually she learned how to be both a publisher and a managing director and to combine that with her family life as the single mother of three. A lot of mistakes were made but she also got a lot of things right. The company prospered, thanks to the risks Judy took in tackling new subjects in the marketplace and also her approach to running the company, which focused on transparency, honesty and trust. Her business strategy was rewarded by the loyalty of the staff, many of whom worked alongside Judy for upwards of twenty years.
Throughout the book Judy describes her learning experience as an entrepreneur, what it really means to run a company, the many triumphs and the pitfalls, what worked and what didn’t, how the company learned to reinvent itself through lean times and how it felt to finally strike gold. There are many pearls of wisdom to be found here, whether you’re looking for business advice relating to the world of publishing or something further afield, or if you simply want to hear the inspiring success story of a woman determined to follow her own path and someone truly ahead of her time.
Discover more about Judy and her journey at www.judypiatkus.com.
Grab a copy of Ahead of Her Time.