Laura Pagan admits that when she opened her first lighting shop in Glasgow, she had no idea what she was doing.

“I look back now and think I must have been absolutely stupid because I didn’t know a single thing about lighting,” she said. “I didn’t know the difference between a 40-watt and a 60-watt lightbulb. My lawyer came in one day and said, ‘Laura, don’t you think you should get a tester so you can test the bulbs before you sell them?’ ”

The eldest of three children, Pagan was born in Glasgow where her father was a shopfitter. She was a quiet child but discovered her forte at the age of 12, when she got a Saturday job working in a fruit shop owned by a family friend.

“I really came out of myself,” she said. “I started dealing with customers and from that point on my confidence grew.”

On leaving school at 16 she got a job as an office junior at Royal Bank of Scotland. It was there she got the idea of opening a shop of her own.

“I got to know a lot of customers who had shops or businesses because in those days everyone came into the bank every day to bank their takings,” she said.

“I used to think having a business must be good because they all drove better cars than anybody who worked at the bank and had nicer lifestyles.”

At the age of 23, and by now married, Pagan decided it was time to put her plan into action. The two customers she admired most at the bank owned a lighting shop and a card shop so she decided to open one of these, with the decision dependent on where she could find premises.

She found a basement shop on one of Glasgow’s premier shopping streets and opted for lighting because the card shop owned by the customer was close by.

She and her husband Alan used joint savings of £8,000 to pay for the lease and stock, and in 1980 Pagan opened for business, selling lights for the home.

The shop did well and two years later she opened another one in a town outside Glasgow. But in 1983 the business faced a cashflow crisis when a truck carrying stock from Italy crashed. Pagan had paid upfront for the stock, which was smashed, and spent a year getting the cash back on insurance.

For 20 years Pagan was content to run two shops, often dropping to just a single outlet as redevelopment by the council forced her to move to new premises.

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