The theory goes that the glass ceiling was shattered long ago and women are now rightly making their mark in many industries where they wouldn’t have stood a chance just a few years ago
Written by John O'Hanlon
Look at one woman entrepreneur and you will soon find another. The more enlightened among us know that when it comes to wealth creation and the drive to start up a new business there’s nothing to choose between the genders, any more than there is between people of different races. That said, women do seem to be better at some things than men, and one of these is networking.
Weaving the web
A prime example of this is Julie Meyer, founder of Ariadne Capital and backer of some of the most exciting technology start-ups Britain has seen in recent years, including Monitise, Skype, Spinvox and Momail. Ariadne let Theseus out of the labyrinth, and that pretty much is what Julie’s company does today. She won an Entrepreneur of The Year award from Ernst & Young in 2000 – although that was for her earlier company, First Tuesday, an international enterprise forum present across five continents, 18 countries, and with more than 41,000 active members.
Meyer believes passionately in levelling the playing field, and she looks on business as a creative process. “I like to deal with all of the chaos, and then try to distil out the principles. For me it has always been about that. What I do now is just an extension of that. I perceive myself to be like an architect or an artist in what I do, rather than an engineer or a financier or a marketeer.”
While women entrepreneurs don’t dominate her portfolio, they are a significant presence, with people like Barbara Thomas, Judge Joanne Goodson, and Candace Johnson among the investors, and Christina Domecq, founder of SpinVox among its clientele.
Domecq followed Julie as an Entrepreneur Of The Year in 2006, following the launch in 2005 through The Carphone Warehouse, The Link and other retail channels. Like Julie, she was educated in America but moved to London convinced that it was the best place for a telecoms entrepreneur to get started. “Having a dependable network is invaluable,” she says.
Exotic talents
The UK has been a magnet for entrepreneurs, who have found light regulatory regimes, free financial markets, and a ready acceptance of new ideas. Outside of Silicon Valley, where stellar female talent like Susan Keplinger - the founder of Triggit - and Laura Mayes, who set up with two female associates the girl-dominated shopping and information network Kirtsy, have thrived. America’s byzantine small business regulations can be a killer.
India is notoriously protectionist; one reason why talented Asians have tended to establish their businesses in the UK before tackling that massive market.
Meena Pathak met her husband Kirit in India in 1976. She had a degree in food technology and hotel management and quickly became the creative force behind the Patak’s brand for which she develops and approves over 20 new recipes a year.
Meena was given an OBE in 2002, and a year ago the company was sold to Associated British Foods for £100 million. She and Perween Warsi, founder of the £100 million company S&A Foods and another successful scion of Ernst & Young’s programme, are prefect examples of women working with the cards they are dealt – there’s nothing wrong with food preparation but it’s definitely traditional female territory.
It has made both women rich – the Pathaks are worth £200 million, Warsi at least £45 million.
Perween Warsi came to the UK in 1976 at the age of 19. Her civil engineer father moved frequently, which gave Warsi the opportunity to understand how to live with people from different cultures, she says. “I loved seeing different places, experiencing different foods and discovering different customs. Constant change was normal.” It’s the networking thing again: as Lord (then Sir Digby) Jones said when presenting her with the CBI’s First Women’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2006. “Teenage girls wondering what to do with their lives should have the confidence to aim high and keep pushing back the boundaries. And their parents should understand that a world of opportunity really does exist out there in a world of business.’’
Women and machines
Women have succeeded in some almost brutally male business environments too. A heroine of mine has long been Pat Grant OBE, founder and for many years CEO of Norfrost the Caithness-based freezer manufacturer. Why freezers? “There was a gap in the market for efficient small freezers.” Why Caithness? “My husband Alex [an engineer and the technical brain in the partnership] came from there.”
Frankly, the odds were stacked against it, but Grant went to Japan to see now they did Lean manufacturing and set up her factory in ultima thule, with a workforce whose experience was largely drawn from sheep farming. But a lot of them were women, so she created a family-friendly business that grew, was profitable and won many awards for quality and innovation over three decades. It was no accident that, when Norfrost finally succumbed to ruthless undercutting from China, it was bought by a road transport company: one of Mrs Grant’s typically innovative and pragmatic solutions to the problem of supplying her market from the north of Scotland had been to set up a logistics subsidiary that ‘exported’ her product south and ‘imported’ the necessaries of highland life as the trucks returned.
Factory management has always been strongly male-dominated but truckers are almost exclusively men, so hats off to pioneers like Pat Grant and Hilary Devey, whose Pall-Ex hub in Leicestershire is one of the most frenzied environments imaginable. Devey founded the company in 1996 in the face of competition for this now familiar logistics model. From the outset she realised the importance of IT and, if anything, her gender has helped her, she says. “Transport has always been associated with dirty vehicles, dirty drivers, foul mouths, and dirty premises. I believe that as a woman I’ve managed to change that. We have beautiful, clean premises. All our staff wear uniforms. Housekeeping is paramount and I’ve managed to change the way the industry is perceived.”
Teach girls they can!
The building trade is even more ‘bloke-ish’ than logistics, but that hasn’t stopped Dawn Gibbins MBE, whose flooring company, Flowcrete, grew from £40,000 in 1982 to £40 million in 2007. Being a young woman in a man’s world was never a big deal, she says: “I just had to learn to become more confident and self-assured. My God, setting up your own business has to be the best way to improve your confidence in a male-oriented industry!” Having just sold the business for £35 million she is now moving on to her next project, which will concentrate on domestic as opposed to commercial flooring.
The emergence of strong and resourceful women entrepreneurs has already changed the landscape in a variety of industries. And as Digby Jones and Julie Meyer agree, education is the final hurdle: the role models are there in multitudes but schools rarely encourage girls to believe there’s no limit to what they can achieve.
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