Go Compare: can anyone compare to founder Hayley Parsons?

Age: Go compare!

Appearance: GO COMPARE!

Occupation: GO COMPARE! GO COMPARE! GO COMPAAAARE!

Make it stop! Everybody in Britain knows those annoying opera singer adverts! Exactly. And now the business is worth £190m.

How come? Because the insurance company esure has just bought the half it didn’t own for £95m.

I’m starting to lose interest. GO COMPARE! GO COMPARE! GO COM-

All right! All right! I’m interested again! As well you should be. Because this is no ordinary insurance business acquisition.

That’s a relief. What is it instead? It’s Hayley Parsons’ crowning glory.

Who’s Hayley Parsons? She’s a 41-year-old Welsh entrepreneuse.

I see. She left school at 16 with five GCSEs, got a job making tea in an insurance office, then got a job selling insurance for Admiral, where she helped to set up confused.com. And it was at this point, in 2006, that she spotted a niche in the market for a Welsh insurance price and product comparison site with a name you could sing to the tune of an American first-world-war recruiting song.

Amazing. You’d think someone would have got there first. But no one had. So Parsons set up gocompare.com, which crucially let people compare policy details as well as prices, worked hard and made the company a huge success while her husband Mark quit his job to look after their two children. She’ll get £44m for selling her stake in this deal, on top of whatever else she’s already made.

Can you tell me what her secret is without singing anything? “I think a lot of it comes down to attitude and personality,” she told Wales Online in 2010. “I’m not afraid to go for something and do it … I meet so many people in business who just get stuck up their own backsides and that’s not me at all.”

So she’s not a shy, diffident character then? No indeed. Those adverts sound like a fair reflection of her style. She even insisted that they find a Welshman to play Gio Compario.

Dear God. He has a name? I’m afraid so. Although some people know him better as the opera singer Wynne Evans.

Not many people. No. probably not.

Do say: “Phew. I’ve finally got that tune out of my head.”

Please, I’m begging you, don’t say: “GO COMPARE!”