How Boris Can Deliver an Easy £250 Billion
So, how’s Boris doing at delivering that £350 million pounds per week? I think we can all agree it was never going to happen, so the less said about that the better. But here’s something we should be talking about, the simplest way to give the UK economy a £250 BILLION pound injection? Why, turns out it’s good old fashioned girl power. The Alison Rose Review for Female Entrepreneurs has just been released, and here’s the headline: ‘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 UK men’.
Rose has run the numbers and it turns out the UK ‘scores highly in international indexes of female entrepreneurship which assess environment, ecosystem and aspirations’ and yet the report makes clear that the cumulative effect of women’s different decisions along the entrepreneurial journey is that ‘men in the UK are five times more likely than women to build a business of £1 million+ turnover’. So, where are we going wrong ladies? Or, more accurately, what isn’t working for us?
For starters, not enough of us are aware of funding opportunities. In fact, female-led businesses receive less funding than those headed by men at every stage of their progression. Women start with significantly less capital, and as a result are less likely to take on debt. Then, there’s the big one… Women are ‘twice as likely’ to find their parental responsibilities a barrier to starting their business. These same responsibilities are an equally important reason that women say stop them from developing their business. This is a bitter truth to swallow for entrepreneurial mother’s all over the UK, as flexibility around family care is the #1 reason to start a business for women with children’. Add to these the ever recurring lack of confidence, fear of ‘going it alone’ and the inevitably fewer contacts women have when compared to men, and we have a truly tragic case of wasted female potential.
One of her recommendations is to promote greater transparency in UK funding allocation through a new Investing in Female Entrepreneurs Code. She also is urging UK based institutional and private investors to further support and invest in female entrepreneurs. I am fully onboard with both of these suggestions, in fact I work with my clients to access funding for start ups and R & D projects.
In my work coaching female entrepreneurs I work through the issues identified by The Rose Report, and my programmes deliver feminine leadership techniques, as well as teaching how to control your mindset, increase your confidence, sales, marketing and the mastery of scaling your business.
