Karen Mitchell — Part 1: The Business Partner

I have thought about writing this down for a long time.

Not to make anyone feel sorry for me. I am past that. But because I think a lot of people have had someone in their life like Lisa, and they might need to hear how it ended.

My name is Karen Mitchell. I am 41 years old and I run a small events company in Sheffield. I started it from scratch in 2018 with a woman I had been friends with since we were nineteen.

Her name was Lisa Barker.

We met at college. She was loud and funny and confident in a way I always wished I was. I was the organised one, the one who remembered birthdays and kept plans and showed up on time. We balanced each other out, or so I thought.

When I had the idea for the events company, Lisa was the first person I told. She got excited immediately. Said we should do it together. I had the contacts and the operational head. She had the personality and the sales ability. On paper it made sense.

We went in fifty fifty. Registered the company, opened a joint account, signed a partnership agreement that a solicitor friend helped us draft.

The first two years were hard but good. We built something real. Corporate events, private parties, a few charity fundraisers that got us some decent local press. By the end of year two we were turning over just under £200,000.

I was proud of what we had built. I thought Lisa was too.

The first sign something was wrong was in January 2022. A client we had worked with twice before, a property company that did a big annual dinner, called me directly to say they had decided to go in a different direction. I was surprised. The feedback had always been good.

Three months later I found out they had booked Lisa. Not our company. Lisa personally, trading under a different name she had set up six months earlier without telling me.

I went back through our client list.

She had approached nine of them.

Read Part 2 here: justiceserveddaily.com/karen-mitchell-part-2