She Started a Care Business to Stay Flexible for Her Daughter's Heart Surgery — Now She Delivers 6,000 Hours of Care Every Week: Nyasha Mangaba on Building Across Five Countries

In this episode of Scale HER Up, I'm joined by Nyasha Mangaba — managing director of Potters Healthcare Limited and co-founder, with her husband, of the Mani Group: a portfolio of businesses operating across Scotland, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Zambia, and Mauritius.

I invited Nyasha to talk about Potters Healthcare. What I got was rather more than that.

In Scotland, Potters Healthcare and sister company Mighty Care provide social support and home care to nearly 500 elderly service users across the central belt — Stirling, Falkirk, Clackmannanshire, East Dunbartonshire, Glasgow and West Lothian. The Mani Group also operates in logistics, farming, beef supply, genetic cattle breeding, retail, and fast food across four African countries.

All of it started because Nyasha's daughter was born with a hole in the heart, and she needed something flexible enough to work around her baby's medical care.

We cover:

• What Potters Healthcare and Mighty Care do — and how they've grown from zero to 6,000 hours of care per week
• Nyasha's background as an occupational therapist and why that gave her a critical advantage with local authorities
• Being hands-on in the business for seven years — and why that was a deliberate choice
• International recruitment after COVID: going to Zimbabwe for staff, getting a sponsorship licence, and the unexpected responsibility of helping people integrate into Scottish life (tatties, messages, and driving on the left)
• Managing across HR, immigration law, care legislation, and five separate software systems
• Six consecutive years of Grade 5 from the Care Inspectorate
• The highs: being recognised in Tesco by families she once cared for, Christmas cards still arriving from families she worked with years ago
• Her book: Shattered Yet Standing — ten stories of women who made it despite everything
• Her PhD in women's entrepreneurship and public health
• The church teaching that planted the entrepreneurial seed: always have something else coming in

Quote of the episode: "Don't look at seven-figure businesses and think you can't build up to that. Start small and scale yourself up. That's what a good entrepreneur should do." — Nyasha Mangaba

If you want to hear what real scale looks like — built from a care visit at a time, with empathy at the centre — this is the episode.