Fine art and PGCE graduate, Hannah Duraid, made use of Sheffield Hallam University's alumni offer of self-employment support to help get her business idea off the ground. The Great Escape Game has gone from strength to strength and now has expanded to a second premises in Leeds.

Hannah Duraid's mantelpiece must be creaking under the weight of all the awards she's scooped up over the past year.

In 2016 Hannah and her partner Peter Lacole received The Duke of York Young Entrepreneur Award, and they won the President's Award of the Institute for Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW). Hannah has recently been named Forward Ladies Young Entrepreneur of the Year, and at the Sheffield Business Awards in December she took home The Next Big Thing and Young Business Person of the Year awards.

It has been two years since Hannah decided to launch the Great Escape Game with her carpenter boyfriend, Peter. The game offers an experience similar to the TV show The Crystal Maze, where people are locked inside a room and given puzzles to solve before they can be freed.

The idea for the business came to Hannah during her time travelling around Australia and south east Asia where similar escape style games were taking off at the time. On returning home, Hannah and Peter realised there was nothing being offered on the same scale in the UK, so got to work on launching their own.

With help from the University's Enterprise Team, they invested their savings and opened the Great Escape Game in Sheffield. Peter got to work using his carpentry skills and spent three weeks building their first escape room - the mad scientist's laboratory. They now have four rooms, all based on different themes at their Sheffield base on Sydney Street.

"When I was studying my degree I got a lot of help with employability, so when I was starting my business I got in touch with the employability team and asked if they had any support they could offer and there was loads. They put us in touch with accountants, marketing, PR advisers. I went and talked through my plans and they gave me lots of advice. They have a huge networks of contacts - it’s where we found a lot of our clients."

Since their opening in 2015, 50,000 people have come through their doors, they have 25 employees and revenue approaching £1m.

"If you’d have asked me when I was doing my degree if a couple of years later I would be running my own business, I wouldn’t have believed you. It’s brilliant."

Hannah's advice for anyone else who has a business idea they want to launch would be to make use of the University's free enterprise advice: "The amount of support available for starting businesses at Hallam is brilliant. The Enterprise Team have been a massive help to me."

If your ambition is to become self–employed, you don't have to get there on your own. As a Sheffield Hallam student – or a graduate from the last five years – you have free access to our specialist business knowledge and resources to improve your chances of success. Last year, we supported almost 600 students with their business ventures.