Shazia

Co-Founder of Third Door

Shazia is the Managing Director and Co-founder of Third Door. Shazia had the idea for a flexible workhub and nursery whilst researching business ideas. Her daughter was five months old at the time and Shazia had decided that she wasn’t too keen on going back to her corporate career. However, Shazia found it difficult to get any work done in between nappy changes, feeding and entertaining her daughter. It was then she wished for place she could work from whilst someone looked after her baby nearby, and ‘Eureka’ there was her business idea!

Shazia researched the idea and found it had a strong probability of working with all the trends for home workings and new technology allowing people to work from home. Shazia’ proposed the idea to her husband who was also studying for his MBA at the time. Yusuf is a homeworker and found it difficult to work at home with his new baby. He used Third Door to write a feasibility study for his MBA dissertation. When he received a Distinction for this new concept, Shazia decided to take voluntary redundancy from her work despite being pregnant with her second child.

Third Door has now been up and running since May 2010. We have won a couple of awards and have a strong membership base growing.

Shazia’s previous careers have been with Nokia as a global brand research manager and as an audience research manager for the BBC (Radio 5 Live, Asian Network and online). Shazia has a Masters in Marketing and a BSc in Mathematics.

When not working at Third Door, Shazia loves cycling, baking, trying out stand-up comedy and meeting up with friends and family!