The Female Founders Forum is hosting a series of webinars to bring leading business owners and parliamentarians together to discuss key policy issues pertinent to female founders in order to to support them through COVID-19 and beyond.
In our latest session on Access to Finance, we explored how policymakers and business leaders can come together to address the barriers that female founders face accessing finance.
In this session, we heard from the Liberal Democrat’s Treasury Spokesperson Rt Hon Baroness Kramer, alongside incredible female founders including Julia Elliott Brown, founder and CEO of Enter the Area, and Alexandra Daly, founder, and CEO of independent placement agency, AA Advisors. We were also joined by Juliet Rogan, head of Barclays HG&E team.
We’ve picked out some of the most thought-provoking insights from the session. You can view this on our YouTube channel.
Highlights & Insights from our Speakers
Juliet Rogan spoke about Untapped Unicorns and how this research spurred The Entrepreneurs Network and Barclays into action to address the funding issue:
“If people don’t look and sound like the people that are investing in them, how can we ever get to a place where there is diversity in the funding landscape”
Alexandra Daly opened with statistics from the Allison Rose Review of Female Entrepreneurship and spoke about the huge opportunity that this research identified for the UK economy:
“Up to £250 billion of new value could be added to the UK economy if women started and scaled new businesses at the same rate as men. Only 1 in 3 UK entrepreneurs are female and female-led businesses are only 44% the size of male-led businesses on average”
She also stressed the importance of bringing business leaders and policymakers together to drive change and unlock access to funding:
“As the economy continues to open up and we turn our attention to rebuilding post lockdown, we want to make sure that female entrepreneurs have all the opportunities to fill their potential and also contribute to the wider economy”
Julia Elliott Brown shared personal insights on the challenges she faced raising finance as a female founder and some of the lessons learned along the way. She stressed two important points:
“[It’s all about] getting women out there in the first place to raise investment and then really looking at the system to how, once they do go out there, we make it work”
She put forward some recommendations to address the funding issue including: investing in skills and support, showcasing role models, and implementing diversity tracking and setting targets.
Baroness Kramer touched on the challenges female founders have faced during COVID-19 accessing government funding. She suggested that COVID-19 is an opportunity for a call to action to modernise the labour market, for the benefit of women:
“It seems to me that we suddenly made a very rapid shift in the direction of a world in which so many women founded businesses are in touch with where the workforce wants to be in contrast to many of the traditional players”
She insisted that women should come together to campaign and put pressure on the government to ensure that government schemes adequately support female founders.
Questions & Recommendations
During the Q&A session, we touched on a range of key issues.
One attendee asked the speakers how female founders within their networks had been affected by COVID-19.
Juliet Rogan spoke about how she has been inspired by the resilience and tenacity of female founders during the pandemic. She mentioned a story about an inspiring female founder who purchased a van to hand-deliver her products during lockdown:
“I thought that it was a demonstrable story about how female founders specifically have been resilient and got stuff done. That is one of the key things I have seen [during COVID-19]”
Julia Elliott Brown said that she didn’t have many success stories to share about female founders who had successfully raised money during COVID-19:
“The only women I have seen raising are the women who have already raised a significant amount of money”
In response, Alexandra Daly stressed that this is a hard time but also shed light on the opportunities coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic:
“When you have a major downturn like this, the companies of tomorrow of tomorrow are made today”
Another attendee spoke about her challenges accessing funding and asked what more could be done to connect female founders with mentors.
Alexandra Daly spoke about the mentor network that she is helping to launch. She stressed that it is vital to match female founders with mentors who understand their industry:
“It has to be accurate, it has to be strategic and it also has to be value orientated”
Julia Elliott Brown mentioned the resources that are out there to support female founders through the fundraising journey, including Enter the Arena.
Baroness Kramer touched on the lack of support provided by the government to help female founders find a mentor and suggested that a better structure could be implemented to bridge the mentoring gap:
“I think we have a communication gap in the UK. I think there are people that are very willing to help who have no idea how to find someone they can help”
One attendee asked what resources are available to help female founders successfully scale their businesses from the start?
Alexandra Daly recommended that female founders seek out angel groups for tailored support:
“[Female Founders] need investors who assist them not just by giving them money, but by giving them advice”
In response Julia Elliott Brown cautioned that it may be difficult to obtain angel investment at the early startup stage:
“The more you can network the better. It is brilliant if you can get in with investment groups. I would just have a word of caution that it is really difficult to obtain angel investment from professional networks when you are at this early stage”
Another attendee asked the speakers for some insights on what they see to be the role of government in alleviating the barriers female founders face accessing finance.
Baroness Kramer took a robust approach and said that is incredibly important for government to follow through with its diversity initiatives to support female founders in their efforts to access finance, especially during COVID-19:
“I feel that is a dire necessity if we are going to have a UK economy that thrives”
Juliet Rogan highlighted the Investing in Women Code as one of the great government initiatives to track investment in female founded enterprises:
“You can’t manage what you can’t measure. One of the key things about the Investing in Women Code is really around tracking and looking at where investment is going”
Baroness Kramer posed a question to the speakers. She asked whether it was women that lacked the confidence to seek investment or whether they felt it isn’t worth putting the energy in because the system is so biased that they will end up being rejected?
“My assumption of [women] has always been that they have smashed into glass ceilings. I just wonder if it is women who lack the skills and confidence they need or the problem is that there is so much bias in the system”
In response Julia Elliott Brown suggested that it can be a bit of both but in her experience, women are often overwhelmed by the process:
“There are so many women that are left behind who no one is seeing in the stats because they aren’t even applying”
Alexandra Daly suggested that the difficulty lies in women being able to understand the different types of funding out there and how to access it:
“It’s about lifting the veil on funding to access the right capital for you and your business”
Juliet Rogan agreed that an important part of female founders being able to access the right finance is understanding what resources are out there to support them:
“It does help [women] to pitch themselves in a way that they can access all of those tools”
We will be continuing the conversation on removing the barriers that female founders face starting and scaling their businesses in our upcoming webinars. You can find out more about the event schedule and sign up for the events here.