I got 3 As but turned down university. At 29, my business makes millions

Lucy Bowes, 29, from Cambridge, had a “gut feeling” that university wouldn’t be right for her. As thousands of A-Levels students find out their results, she tells The i Paper that even academically talented students don’t need university to succeed. I’m the only one out of my friendship group to have not gone to university. When I was a teenager, I went to a really good sixth-form college that was basically an Oxbridge feeder school. My mum had been to teacher training college and my dad had been to agricultural college but both had always envisioned that me and my sisters would go to university. I’m the youngest – one of my sisters is both a doctor and a lawyer and the other is a teacher. Because I’d also done so well at school, it was assumed I’d go to university. I’d always been top of my class, but midway through my second year in sixth form, I really struggled. I’d got in with a bad crowd of people and was, like a stereotypical teenager, going out a lot. I dropped out in January of Year 13 to sort myself out. I took a job at the pub and in some ways it was good – it’s how I met my husband! – but I then decided it would be a shame to not go back and finish my A-Levels. So just as my friends were going off to uni, becoming freshers, I went back to school in September. I didn’t know a single person, which was really challenging, but it did enable me to get my head down and study hard and I did really well in the end, getting A*AA in psychology, English and Latin. Shorts I’d applied to study English literature at university, and got offers from Edinburgh and Bristol, but even after accepting the offer from Bristol, that summer I just knew I didn’t want to do it. I wasn’t excited to go, had a gut feeling of dread and every time I’d been to visit my friends at uni it had been like the TV show Fresh Meat. I’d never seen houses looking so disgusting, with so much stuff in the kitchen you couldn’t even see the counters. I’d been working since I was 15, I’d always had money to do the things I’d wanted to do and it gave me a great feeling of independence. I pulled out before my uni course started. My parents thought I should go. It’s no reflection on them, it’s just that uni was the normal path. They were worried I’d that I was going to waste my potential. I applied for jobs in marketing, but employers seemed to be very hot on me having a degree. It was really stressful and I was often upset, wondering if I’d made the right decision. Eventually, six months later, I landed a job as an accounts assistant at a property development company and everything became easier. While my friends were off living the student life, I spent all of my time doing accountancy exams, smashing through them as quickly as I possibly could. I earned a good salary, and got bonuses. Which meant I bought my first house – with my now-husband – when I was 21 and he was 26, thanks to some parental help with a springboard mortgage. It cost £195,000 and was just outside of Cambridge. We’ve also been able to pay for our wedding. That said, not going to uni did mean I missed out socially – I basically had no life during that time. TV shows like Suits had given me the impression that if you work in finance you’d go out loads with your work friends, but I was the youngest person in the office by about 20 years. All my colleagues had children, so no one was going to the pub after work. Meanwhile my friends at uni were still going out loads and have whole friendship groups that they met at uni. Social media made it worse. Lucy and her husband adopted Lola in 2019 and her image inspired their company, Lucy and Lola But I was miles ahead of my friends, and not going to university has worked so well for me. I’ve always been a big animal lover, and in 2019, me and my husband rescued Lola, a sausage dog. She’s like our baby and around lockdown I started drawing loads of pictures of her. I bought an embroidery machine and began turning them into stitched portraits and putting them on all my T-shirts. As a sort of pandemic side hustle, I started selling the T-shirts on Etsy. Around the time I was qualifying as a chartered accountant, the company I was working at headed towards an acquisition. I had this idea that I’d love to be able to do my own thing and take the Etsy business full time. So I took voluntary redundancy and was basically paid to leave. I took the money and legged it. I used it to help set up Lucy and Lola, which is now independent of Etsy and we sell custom embroidered portraits of animals on sweatshirts, T-shirts, hoodies, fleeces, cushions. We’re currently making a turnover of £2m a year and made a £120,000 profit last year. Soon after launching the company properly in 2022, my mum stopped asking me every other week whether I was going to go to uni. I still think she’d be secretly thrilled if I turned around and said I was going, but my parents can see that the company has been super successful. When I told her we have 500,000 social media followers she couldn’t believe it – it’s good to have someone keep you humble! We’re based in an office just outside of Cambridge and we’re so busy at the moment – we do reptiles, chickens, ferrets. At Christmas someone sent a jar of what looked like a jar of snake eggs – when we double checked that he’d sent the right image over, he clarified: “It’s my girlfriend’s sourdough starter, called Morris. Could you do a sweatshirt with Morris on?” And that’s probably the best thing we’ve done. I run the company with my husband – we employ 12 people but at Christmas we take on extra part-time staff to meet demand, so there will be around 30 of us. As a person who hires people myself, I’m not bothered if people have been to university or not. I’d rather see someone that’s got three years of work experience, because I can just plug them into the world of work and watch them go. We also run an apprentice scheme too, which I feel is my way of paying it forward. I don’t have anything against people with degrees, – I just think it’s not for everybody. And just because you’ve done well at school and you’ve had that academic success doesn’t necessarily mean you need to go to university. No one at school said to me “maybe you would do better with this path”. Cynically, it seems like universities are just businesses that have to sustain themselves. When you do something different, people will question it and say you’re making a mistake, until it pays off. Just because uni is what your parents expect or what everyone else does, doesn’t mean have to do it and cannot take your own path. You’ve got to do what’s best for you. That might be university – but it might not.