TWENTY minutes before we meet, Dawn Gibbins rings my mobile. “I wanted to know what you’d like to drink. Champagne? Beer?” Crikey, I think I’m in boss heaven. Ooh, beer please. Ten minutes later, when I’m waiting in the foyer in Claridge’s, the posh old London hotel where she’s staying, she rings again. “I’ll be just a mo,” she says in her warm Cheshire accent, “got to put on my outfit.” Er, right.

Five minutes later, she emerges from the lift, and the photographer and I are stunned. Tall, hawk-nosed, auburn-permed and giggling infectiously, Gibbins is wearing a brassy orange trouser suit with slashed-to-the-floor, shoulder-padded frock coat complete with hand-painted, leopard-skin-print patches. She looks, in short, as if she’s about to go on stage with Elton John. “I got a friend to make it for the reception,” she says, giving a twirl to the foyer. “What do you think?”

I think Gibbins is a confident lady. And she has every right to be: already an MBE, last week she became Veuve Clicquot Business Woman of the Year, an award that, when we met, seemed to have her bubbling over with excitement. What’s more extraordinary is how she won it — heading a company selling specialist flooring to a construction market that is one of the most male-dominated industrial sectors left.

“Only 15% professional women in construction,” she says, reeling off the statistics. “And what’s the first thing you think of in construction?” Hairy-a**ed builders. “Right. I’m on a one-woman crusade to ban the builder’s bottom.” And she laughs, loudly.

Not since Veuve Clicquot honoured Anita Roddick, the Body Shop founder, can such a force of nature have stepped up to the podium. Gibbins, 44, is famous in her own niche sector for being upfront, leading with a smile, always available — perhaps as a combative reaction to the in-built sexism of the trade she deals with. How will the rest of us react? Probably with hesitant caution, until her effervescent bonhomie bowls us over, too.

And she is more than just front. She has the figures to back it up. Her company, Flowcrete, based in Sandbach, 25 miles south of Manchester, is now the world’s No 2 manufacturer of specialist industrial and commercial flooring. It provides the technology to make floors for stadiums, car parks, airports, hospitals, shopping centres and factories. If you’ve been to the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff, you’ve stood on Flowcrete. If you shop at Marks & Spencer, park under Park Lane or pass through Heathrow, Gatwick or Hong Kong’s Chep Lap Kok, you’ve walked on Flowcrete, too.

It all started with her dad, Peter, an industrial chemist with a bent for vinyl technology, who was asked to make a sugar-proof factory floor for Mars. Gibbins, an only child, stuck between jobs, began marketing his ideas to others.

That was 20-odd years ago. Now the company does self- levelling floors, multicoloured floors, antibacterial floors, antiskid floors and more. It has nearly 200 staff around the world and a likely turnover this year of £25m.

Gibbins runs it as chairman, with her husband, Mark Greaves, as group managing director. Greaves was lured out of a good job at Shell 14 years ago. “We halved his salary,” she says, laughing. Others say the two make a good team. Gibbins, loud and direct, concentrates on marketing, developing new products and getting Flowcrete noticed. Greaves, four years younger, a wiry rugger player, drives the numbers and runs the day-to-day operations.

Do they clash much? “He’s the one who wants to expand more abroad,” says Gibbins. “I have to hold him back.”

“She gets the hump when I criticise the new ideas,” retorts Greaves, “but we’re both really passionate about the business.” He adds that their UK managing director always sits between them at board meetings, though to protect whom from whom is not specified.

And how has a tiny company from Sandbach managed to turn itself into a global competitor? “Well, most of the big boys are into commodities,” says Gibbins. “We’re very niche, very focused. We really know our route to market and which customers we have to influence.”

One of those trade customers says Gibbins and Greaves have been smart, concentrating only on vinyl resin flooring, developing new products and application technologies, backing the right horse in the right race.