We have a great article from Neeta Patel, CEO of New Entrepreneurs Foundation.
Neeta is an experienced executive with over 20 years of strategy and operational leadership
experience in launching new ventures, business turnarounds and change and has a sharp focus on growth and revenues. She has a successful track record of turning ideas and concepts into tangible businesses. Her experience spans financial services, media & publishing, education, arts and the creative industries. She has also led two of her own start-ups.
Prior to joining the New Entrepreneurs Foundation, Neeta worked in Private Equity matching
technology entrepreneurs with investors. Neeta has held senior positions at Thomson Financial (Reuters), Legal & General PLC, Financial Times Group and at the British Council. She is an early internet pioneer having launched the first personal finance web site in Europe for L&G in 1996.
Neeta holds an MA in Chemistry from Oxford University, an MBA (Marketing) from Cass Business School, and a Sloan Fellowship in Strategy and Leadership from London Business School, where she was the winner of the PWC prize in 2009 for a consultancy assignment in China.
Here is her advice:
An entrepreneur needs to have certain key skills and personality traits in order to be successful.I have had many discussions and debates about this, and yet gender has never come up as a particular element. I am reluctant to single out women entrepreneurs in some ways because by doing so, the inference is that they need special help and advice. They don’t. However, there are a number of factors which hold women back when contemplating setting up as an entrepreneur, and I feel its important to encourage them to overcome these and discover how good life as a female entrepreneur can really be. Following a really inspiring female entrepreneur’s event we organised at the New Entrepreneurs Foundation recently, I wanted to share some of the wisdom from leading female entrepreneurs which may help anybody wavering over whether to take the plunge.
Women-led businesses add £70 billion to the UK economy. The latest stats from the Department
of Business, Innovation and skills show that the number of women starting their own business has increased. It still stands at only 19%, but is heading in the right direction. More encouraging is the fact that a quarter of new businesses which are two to three years old have been started by women.
So why do women need extra advice, if they are doing so well anyway? The reason is that not
enough of them are taking the plunge.
Lack of self belief seems to be one of the main reasons. Many women tell me they don’t think they will be taken seriously, that they don’t think they will be viewed as credible when they pitch for investment and that the business world is too tough to make an impact.
Having had years of pitching to some of the scariest venture capitalists around during the early stages of my career, I know what I am talking about when I say that success is nothing to do with gender but with how well you prepare and how well you know your numbers and your business and the market in which it operates.
Remember that women often have far better emotional intelligence than men, and this is very
useful as an entrepreneur in a whole host of ways including negotiating, picking your team and reading people and situations effectively.
Eleanor Mills is Associate Editor of the Sunday Times and one of Britain’s most high profile
commentators. She was fantastically inspiring to potential entrepreneurs at our event recently. She was adamant that women must support each other in business. There is, she says, a specific place in hell for women who don’t.
Geeta Sidhu-Robb, who trained as a lawyer, benefitted from the phenomenally successful Anglo
Scandinavian investments run by her ex-husband in the 90s but when their marriage ended, became penniless. She had three small children to look after on her own, but, armed with those qualities which mark out an entrepreneur she set up a new business called Nosh Detox, which she ran from her kitchen, delivering personalised organic food packages. She is once again very successful and urges other women to become self-sufficient. The only thing that gets in the way of your success is yourself, she maintains.
Adele Barlow, another panellist was so encouraged by the number of young, aspiring female
entrepreneurs who attended the evening that she wrote an excellent blog offering some great tips for wannabe female entrepreneurs, cautioning women to choose their female friends wisely, why you should ignore the nagging from your mother about your love life, and how to choose a good hero, or heroine.
Other advice that was well-received during the event included going for crowd funding rather than traditional methods of fund raising, and exhortations not to be squeamish about being supremely confident when pitching for money. It’s not showing off!
Finally, I would say think really positively about being a female entrepreneur. You have far more flexibility and freedom to run your business and balance your quality of life than you would have in regular employment and if you relish a challenge there are few things more exciting in life than making your own business succeed.