Charities have a good advocate in the “superwoman” investment manager Nicola Horlick, who puts the case for private organisations learning from charities.

“Charities that I have been involved with have been very well run, very efficient, run by excellent people and my experience has been very, very positive – it is not a case of the charity sector learning from the private sector, as is usually suggested, more the private sector learning from the charity sector frankly. The events of recent weeks questions whether they [the private sector] know what they are doing.”

Such an endorsement is praise indeed from a woman who headed Morgan Grenfell’s pension fund business at 30, started up SG Asset Management in 1997, and now runs her own company, Bramdean Asset Management.

It is also typical of her open style, a characteristic she is well aware of. “I need a strong, older male figure, father figure, to help me function properly,” she says openly, indicating a need for a balance to her more open approach.

Though very much her own person and a women of substance who has made it in a man’s world, she says she hates being called a superwoman.

“I have always hated the superwoman tag. Being a superwoman is living with kids in a tower block having to go to work and come back with bags of shopping. I am not a superwoman at all.”

She does however, have a very strong history working with, and for, the top charities in the country. Great Ormond Street, UNICEF and Barts Hospital to name but a few.

Her involvement with charities has a long history having undertaken her first charity event when she was ten.

“It was for a man who got a wheelchair from the local authority but they refused to give him a ramp to get into his house, so we had a garden party as a party fundraiser for this man, and raised enough money to get him a ramp.”

Although in more recent times much of the commitment to her charity causes comes as a legacy from the death of her 12 year-old daughter Georgie to Leukaemia ten years ago in Great Ormond Street Hospital. Her deep feelings for Georgie are evident during our conversation. “I had such a real sense of loss,” she says.

Her passion for Great Ormond Street has grown ever since, but her charity work also branched out from Georgie’s passions.

Her work with UNICEF, a couple of years after Georgie died is one such example, as it became a charity close to her heart, thanks to her daughter.

“Georgie was very concerned with children and starvation in Africa. When she was having her bone marrow transplant, she saw images on the television of starving children and Georgie asked ‘why are they wasting money on this bone marrow transplant, which may not even work, when all those children need is food, wouldn’t it be better spending money on feeding them?’.

“I thought that was amazing, to have that attitude. So I wanted to get involved from that and I did that for nearly three years.”The work was concentrated on Zambia. “The average life expectancy in Zambia is 37.”

In this way, Horlick is a model example of a successful business person using her success for the benefit of charity work. Charities can only exist and grow in civil society if people within other walks of life participate, on a regular and consistent basis.

Given the emotional ties, which charity has been most rewarding? “I think UNICEF was really important, and Great Ormond Street, because of Georgie, and the Bart Rebuillding Project I really enjoyed, because the outcome was so incredible and everybody I know who has been there, or had any treatment, says how incredible it is.”

In short, Horlick is enthusiastic about all of them. A career built on finance means that charities can call on her unique expertise when she is on board. What does she advise charities to do to survive in the current credit crisis?

“It is about being professional, thinking about their role. It is about being well organised and targeting their appeals,” she says. When I ask about charities investing, with many failing to exploit the range of investment opportunities on offer, Horlick has an interesting take for an investment expert.

“It is not necessarily the fault of the charities,” she says. “I don’t want to be rude about people investing on behalf of charities, but often the best teams are focused on the big corporate pension schemes and the not so good teams end up managing charity money. So frankly, charity money could be managed better, but it isn’t necessarily the fault of the charity. It is just that the offering is not that good from my profession.”

So given her passion for the sector, would she consider working for a charity in the near future?

“Health is something I am really interested in,” she confesses, without making any commitments. She is pursuing this regularly anyway, being on the Board of a NHS Foundation Trust and chair of the London Health Forum, which brings together the public sector, the voluntary sector and private sector.

“The life expectancy within poorer and rich areas of London is very stark, a difference of around ten years. Mental health is also very important. And it is important to get collaboration between all the sectors: private and public.”

With her new business off the ground, Horlick is now looking forward, and she plans to write a new book, a follow up to her 1998 Can You Have It All? “It was about the fact you can’t,” she says.

The sequel will be about life without Georgie. Looking at her life she says: “I have been very lucky and given huge amounts of responsibility. Part of my problem is that I got to the top of my profession so fast. Setting up your own business is totally different and is what I needed. It was the next challenge.”

Her second husband is the journalist and thriller writer Martin Baker and Horlick spends much of her spare time, when not attending to her five children by “being a taxi service”, editing her husbands books. Her own favourite book is the Alchemist. “It's a parable that says, you have to keep going, whatever happens, and that is my view as well.”

Top