‘My superpower was radical naivety when starting out’

Sian Sutherland has successfully swapped industries every seven years, here she tells Lydia Spencer-Elliott why she's fearless and how to know when an idea's worth leaping on

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Sian Sutherland is a business chameleon who's pivoted to a new industry every seven years. She started her career in advertising before taking a leap and opening a restaurant in Soho – she earned her first Michelin star a year later, aged 25.

After successfully opening her own marketing agency, she saw a gap in the market for pregnancy skincare products. Her brand, Mama Mio, was stocked in Selfridges, Harrods and John Lewis, with its first product, Tummy Rub, bringing in revenues of $500,000 (£365,500) in the first year. She sold the company for £3.7m in 2015.

In her latest pivot, Sutherland's environmental organisation A Plastic Planet uses her entrepreneurial acumen to find pro-business solutions to turning off the plastic tap. In the UK so far, they've been incremental in introducing the plastics tax, banning the export of plastic waste from the UK to developing countries and axing plastic takeaway cutlery.

Sutherland has won Female Marketer of the Year, the CEW Achiever Award, Entrepreneur of the Year and British Inventor of the Year.

I started my career in the heyday of advertising in the late Eighties, when you went out to lunch and never came back. It was an exciting time, but as the industry grew, I realised that I wasn't a big company person; I like everyone to feel like they're an important cog in the machine. So, I left and started my own restaurant, Sutherlands in Soho. I'd never even been a waitress, so it was an ambitious thing to do. But we raised the money on the enterprise initiative scheme, where people get tax relief when buying shares in a company. I found the building, hired a very good chef and a fantastic restaurant manager. We opened when I was 25 and won a Michelin star in our first year. I probably learnt more about business in five years of running that restaurant than in anything else I've done.