We’re getting the dial moving on women-led businesses

This month, I’ve been thinking about innovation, women’s entrepreneurship - and the power of collaboration, writes Henrietta Brealey.

There’s plenty of gender gaps in the stats when it comes to entrepreneurship. According to The Gender Index, just 19 per cent of companies in the West Midlands are female led. This falls to 11.73 per cent of the companies receiving angel investment and 5.65 per cent of those receiving VC investment.

One of the forums I’m proud to represent the Chamber on is the NatWest West Midlands Women In Business Taskforce. It’s a meeting of collaborators to discuss, design and then deliver tangible outputs to ‘move the dial’ on challenges currently facing female founders in the region. It probably won’t surprise you at all that this is a topic close to my heart.

A few months ago we received a presentation from Jill Paye – the rather impressive Chair of The Gender Index on the aforementioned data and insight on women’s entrepreneurship and investment. And we looked at what we could do, however big or small, to help shift the dial.

At the Chamber, we know how important access to investor networks and profiling and championing high potential businesses are to securing their success. So, we brought together our colleagues in our innovation team, NatWest, the British Business Bank to bring you the Women Entrepreneurs Pitch Competition.

A panel of investors, a room full of entrepreneurs and individuals very connected within the region’s business ecosystem and four female founded companies pitching to be our ‘One To Watch’.

We had over 40 applicants for the competition and, let me tell you, there is no shortage of impressive women-led businesses in the region. Our final four were an absolute testament to the diverse range of innovative business ideas out there in the West Midlands.

We had:

Magdalena Karlikowska from Cytecom - who have created an a portable, standalone, and easy-to-use device for rapid detection of live bacteria.

Christina French from Essench Cosmetic Solutions - who provide a complete service of sustainable and ethical product development to the cosmetics industry from sourcing raw ingredients to manufacture, labelling and packaging.

Olivia Simpson from SymbioTex - who have developed sustainably cultivated, compostable seaweed based pellets to replace single use plastics in production of medical devices such as inhalers.

Roksana Kasprzyk from SAFEQUEEN - who have developed a platform for reporting women's harassment incidents within Birmingham venues.

All brilliant in their own way but, of course, there could be only one winner: Olivia Simpson from SymbioTex. Although the quality of the pitches certainly made it a challenging deliberation for our judges - Hannah Tapsell Chapman form Mercia Asset Management, Liz Hobster from Midven and Paul Faulkner from RCL Partners.

I have to say – the buzz in the room was fantastic. The event itself had collaboration at the heart of it – between our team at the Chamber, Harinder Kunor at NatWest, Tracy Sherratt at the British Business Bank and our taskforce members and supporters Fiona Latter, Debbie Assinder and Jim Shirley, it really was a team effort. It was great to see so many new collaborations and connections forming during the event too.

So, what happens next? Of course, we’ll be keeping in touch to look for opportunities to help unleash to potential of our pitchers and applicants, but I also have an ask for you, the reader.

Earlier this week I caught up with another brilliant entrepreneur who reminded me that when it comes to opportunities like accessing investment “nothing beats a warm introduction”.

A cracking pitch deck and proactive approach to seeking meetings may get your foot in the door, but a warm introduction will ensure your potential investor arrives with an open mind.

The same is true of many opportunities in business as in life. It’s why we specialise in developing and nurturing networks at the Chamber.

So, my ask is, keep these and other brilliant women-led businesses front of mind. On the off chance an opportunity to comes up to recommend them as a supplier, speaker or even to a potential investor – give them a plug.

You never know, yours might just be the warm introduction needed to catapult them to the next level.

Henrietta Brealey is CEO of Greater Birmingham Chambers of Commerce

This column first appeared in the Birmingham Post