Claire Leftwich is finance and operations director at bakery Bells of Lazonby. Claire grew up in Kendal before studying psychology at the University of Edinburgh. She returned to Cumbria and completed her Chartered Institute of Management Accountants qualification to begin a career which has seen her work in senior finance positions for some of the best known large, local firms in the county over the last 10 years. She lives near Kirkby Lonsdale with husband Mark and their two children Aimee, 13, and Nathan, 10.

My dad was an accountant and so maybe finance was in my blood. Even though I studied psychology, the lure of the Lake District was really hard to shake and I came back and found my way into finance by doing my CIMA qualifications.

I’m really interested in the story that you can tell with numbers and I'm interested in business. I like to be able to help shape businesses through what the numbers are telling me. It's very satisfying to do the accountancy side and to sit there with a spreadsheet and add everything up. But what I'm really passionate about is how those numbers then affect the decisions and the trajectory of businesses. What do those numbers on the page tell us about how we're performing and where we can make improvements and where we can save money and affect the bottom line?

I got my first job as finance assistant and then a finance manager at Lakeland Leather, based in Ambleside and then I worked for various start-ups in Manchester and Liverpool.

For five years I worked in software and IT and all those wonderful industries to help companies get finance functions in place. I worked my way up to become finance director for a company which supplies software for universities and hospitals.

I loved my time there, but for me, personally speaking, travelling to Manchester and Liverpool was becoming difficult with small children and I didn’t want to spend three to four hours on the road every day, going back and forth to work.

I began looking for jobs more locally and I moved to become head of finance at the other Lakeland, the homeware retailer. It was a fantastic, family business and very similar to Bells, in that it is still owned by the Rayner family and has the same core values at its heart such as caring about employees and caring about sustainability.

It was a wonderful place to be and it was going through a rapid change and a lot of growth when I was there during Covid. There was quite a lot of acceleration from physical retail stores to home shopping, which for Lakeland was actually going back to their grassroots as a catalogue business.

By November 2022 I was looking for a new challenge in a financial director role and moved to paper and materials maker James Cropper Plc, in Burneside, for a year before an opportunity came up to work at Bells.

I came to the site and immediately wanted to be part of this business and part of this family. The innovation and the rapid growth potential here is just incredibly exciting.

It's nice for us to all be working towards sending out millions of portions of cake across the country. No one eats cake when they're sad. It's always a celebration to have a piece of cake. So it's lovely to be part of those moments of joy and celebration for our customers.

There is something about the personality of working for a firm that has that family connection that has always been important to me. It almost feels like a privilege to be part of that story. It's not a faceless organisation and there's a story behind it.

It was the same with Lakeland. They started selling out of a car boot and my parents talked about buying Tupperware from the Rayners at car boot sales and so it had been part of my childhood. Similarly, I remember when there were Bells stores in Kendal and we used to buy our bread from there when I was young. They are all names that have been familiar to me growing up and it's fantastic to now be part of that legacy and journey.

I have always liked to be involved in all aspects of a business. Even when I was relatively junior in my career as a finance manager you saw and heard about all aspects of the business and the impact that you had wasn't just related to finance. I've never been the type of person that just wants to sit in a cocoon and churn out numbers. I want to see what impact my work has across the business and you get that working with smaller family businesses.

I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else but the Lake District. I just love living in a rural area and being near my family and being able to raise my children here. I wanted them to have the childhood that I had growing up in the South Lakes, where you could be out in the hills or on the lake.

I love the fact that I can leave work at five o’clock and meet my family at the lake and go paddleboarding in the summer. I’d much rather be doing that than sitting in and watching TV.