Supporting female founders
A series of workshops run Dr John Mullins has helped female founders understand that investment is not always the answer
Female Founders Rise (FFR) recently collaborated with London Business School’s Institute of Entrepreneurship and Private Capital (IEPC) to host two full-day workshops run by John Mullins, LBS’s associate professor of management practice in marketing and entrepreneurship, and IEPC’s Jeff Skinner, a Teaching Fellow of Strategy and Entrepreneurship.
Part of the reason for doing this was to help female founders “get a bit further down the line before they need to get funding”, said the founder of FFR Emmie Faust in a recent interview in The Times newspaper (‘Investment is not always the answer for female founders’, The Times, April 10 2024). “Funding is a massive problem for a percentage of businesses that need funding but it’s about what else can you do before you need to get that and therefore hopefully make that process easier.”
Dr Mullins has been running these workshops for female entrepreneurs for the past two months, and in a recent article in Forbes (‘Female Founders: Has Their Time Finally Come?, Forbes, February 9 2024), said the following:
“Why is the business world failing women in educating, encouraging, training and supporting them in their entrepreneurial endeavours? Of course, there are academic institutions such as my own London Business School and the Institute of Entrepreneurship and Private Capital (IEPC) which do a considerable amount to turn this difficulty into an opportunity. A case in point: In the coming weeks I will be working with LBS colleagues to deliver three one-day workshops for an incredibly diverse lot of more than 200 female founders from across the UK. Part of the Female Founders Rise (FFR) initiative, the workshops we offer will seek to bring more UK women into entrepreneurship and help them succeed in doing so. As FFR’s founder Emmie Faust (a formidable entrepreneur in her own right) puts it, “Bringing high-quality entrepreneurial learning to female founders is vitally important. Building relationships and finding other founders at a similar stage of growth is also critical to achieving success. These workshops will enable our members to foster deeper connections in person”.
One of the entrepreneurs attending the workshop was Nicky van Breugel, who runs Circe Health, a platform for booking holistic health treatments including acupuncture, reflexology and osteopathy. She raised £50,000 from friends and family in 2021 and won a £50,000 grant from Innovate UK but is otherwise bootstrapping the business with no plans to raise further external investment. Despite being from a non-technical background — she used to work in art galleries — she taught herself to code and created the first version of the website.
“It’s incredible what you learn along the way if you push your own limits in terms of what you think you can do,” said Van Breugel, 37. She said the fact that she’s bootstrapping, rather than having the backing of a large venture capital fund, means that her customers, who are often small businesses themselves, are very supportive. “A lot of our customers feel like they’re really on the journey with us and they’re happy to support our growth in terms of sharing [our story] with other people.”
