SHE’S the straight-talking Apprentice candidate known for driving a hard bargain in negotiations – often to the irritation of other contestants.
But Welsh firecracker Nadia Suliaman admits she’s had to become thick-skinned after growing up on a tough Swansea council estate and facing racism as a kid.
Now the entrepreneur reveals her first home in London was a rat-infested bungalow which she shared with 30 people and she once spent a year living in a campervan so she could save £30,000 towards launching her first hair and beauty salon.
Speaking exclusively to The Sun, Nadia, 36, says: “Growing up I had to be street-wise to survive.
“There’d be kids being a nuisance just hanging out on corners of the estate and you’d have to know how to hold your own.”
Nadia’s mum Margaret, 66, is half-Welsh and half-Irish, while her dad, Mohaned, 59, is Iraqi.
As a kid, Nadia was taunted in the school playground at her local comprehensive for looking different from other children and was called racist names.
“There were only three in our class from ethnic backgrounds and I just don’t think the other kids understood anything about Iraq or other cultures.
“It built some form of resilience in me though, so that I was able to deal with any challenge in life.
“If I hadn’t come up against those experiences perhaps I would not be able to deal with what I am doing now.”
Bungalow hovel
Nadia is the co-founder of Forbici London – a chain of five hair and beauty salons across London, with a flagship store in Knightsbridge and concession stores inside four prime location high-end Hackett London menswear stores.
But her first job, after landing a degree in Business and Finance from Swansea University, was working for Coca-Cola as an account manager.
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Within ten days she’d made the move from Wales – finding a £400-a-month bungalow in Isleworth, Middlesex, that she shared with 30 others.
She says: “It was a five-bedroom bungalow with 30 people living in it. The rooms were carved up with partition walls to fit all of us.
“I was on a bed in the kitchen and it had mice and rats but I didn’t really care. I was like, ‘that’s what I have to do, right?’ and I had hardly any time to relocate.
“I had this huge corporation Coca-Cola wanting to take little Nadia from Swansea to London and I just didn’t think about it.”
She says: “I worked my way up in the business world. I started in sales then I worked as a marketing strategy and planning manager. I did sales director roles.
“I worked with a lot of guys. I used to smash it out of the park with sales but I used to get absolutely trashed because they could not cope with the fact that I was a strong woman.
“I’d come in and completely disrupt everything but my bosses absolutely loved it. They were like, ‘She’s coming here. She’s got high energy, she’s smashing sales. She’s driving the team’
“That made them look bad because they weren’t getting noticed.
“But I still hated the fact that a lot of men were getting paid more than me when I was doing more. My attitude was, ‘ You’re never going to be happy now unless you have your own business. It’s in you. You’re an entrepreneur.”
In her twenties, she met Tyson Aulsebrook, 40, on the dating site Hinge. He was a men’s grooming expert in Harrod’s, Knightsbridge.
The pair, who were later engaged, saw the potential in marrying their skill set and opened their first hair and beauty salon in Knightsbridge in 2020, using savings from their jobs and an investment from Nadia’s mum.
“We put everything in there. My bank balance was zero and we’d just taken out a ten-year lease which we had to put a down-payment on.
“It was three weeks before Covid kicked in and we needed more money to get it off the ground.”
The pair owned and were living in an apartment in Chiswick, West London, but decided to rent it out and move into a campervan they bought on Gumtree for £6,000 from a man in Brighton.
Nadia says: “It was a short-term sacrifice for a long-term gain. We lived in it for a year to save and get an additional £30,000 for the salon. It felt resourceful but I had to make huge lifestyle changes.
“I had to get rid of most of my clothes and other things, so I left them with my mum.
“We were living off beans on toast because there was so little space to cook.
“Our friends were like, ‘You’re absolutely barking mad. What are you doing?’ They offered to let us stay in their flats but we didn’t want to have to rely on anyone else.
“We’d already moved into the camper a month before we launched the business and I was still doing a normal corporate job to make money.
“Every morning I’d put a full power suit on in the campervan and when I stepped out of the campervan to go to work there’d be dog walkers going to the park giving me funny, suspicious looks.
“It’s mad really because there’s so much stigma around people being different and making sacrifices but I don’t think you can learn without being in deprivation at some point in your life.
“Discomfort literally makes you grow as a person. It teaches you the values of life and what’s important. I really believe that you grow more under stress than you do with living comfortably.”
The money saved by the move helped Nadia and Tyson to grow the business from day one, invest in staff coming in, pay the lease and bills and for stock – but it was still extremely tough after the business was shut due to the pandemic.
A year later a senior boss at Hackett London came to the salon and asked them to create a male grooming destination within their stores.
They started a men’s grooming concession inside a Hackett store on Sloane Street and after its success launched into London’s Regents Street, Covent Garden and more recently Liverpool Street, while Nadia was still filming The Apprentice.
Nadia says the five salons are now turning over £800,000 a year between them.
Apprentice trolls
The confident entrepreneur came under fire from some viewers during last week’s third episode.
The teams were tasked with trying to source nine items at the best price in the town of Stratford-upon-Avon and the surrounding Warwickshire countryside.
Nadia opened her negotiations by offering £1.50 for a sheep’s fleece, immediately after being told the seller would charge £20.
One viewer joked on Twitter: “£1.50, that’s absolutely baaa baarick”, while another described it as “insulting”.
Nadia says: “I specialise in negotiations. I went down the hard bargaining route and there’s nothing wrong with that. I opened extreme.
“He wasn’t going to accept £1.50 and of course, I didn’t expect him to, but what it was doing was throwing a curve ball in there to make him think.
“At some point, we’re going to meet in the middle and that was the aim of the game and Liam and I smashed it. I was a bad cop and he was a good cop.
“I knew that I wanted to close somewhere between 10 and 13 quid and we won the task because we got that for £12.
“Fundamentally, Lord Sugar had said, ‘Go out and get the cheapest price.
“He hasn’t told me to go out and build relationships with customers and stand there for three hours. If he had told me that, that’s what I would have done but time is of the essence. We’ve got to make things happen.”
She also denied being disruptive during tasks.
Nadia says: “For me, there is a big difference between disruption and challenging the status quo if you have something beneficial to add.”
Despite being at odds with fellow candidate Amber Rose in the second week she also insists: “I’m friends with everyone in The Apprentice house. Everyone is a winner in that process, I don’t care what anyone says.”
Now she’d love to be the next Baroness Karren Brady.
She says: “My passion can take over sometimes. I can be a little bit domineering or forward but I think you have to be like that in order to make a mark in the industry and I think Karren is like that – someone who is just going to go for it.
“She would have had to gain respect in a male-dominated market too. She’s hugely inspirational and a strong woman so of course I’d love to be like her!”
The Apprentice airs Thursdays on BBC One and is available to stream on iPlayer.
