Mei Shui: Angelic startups mean business

Being your own boss really can allow you to '˜have it all', writes Mei Shui

In the build-up to International Women’s Day I’ve heard lots of talk about closing the gender pay gap, smashing through glass ceilings and a ­quota for females on company boards. Well, thousands of women are achieving all of the above in one fell swoop, by starting their own businesses.

These women are placing their destinies in their own hands and I think celebrating this has to be one of the most inspiring ways to show the world we mean business on International Women’s Day. As managing director of Virgin StartUp, I come across fantastic women following their entrepreneurial dreams every day.

Last night, the Scottish Government and Scotland’s only female angel group, Investing Women, hosted a dinner at Edinburgh Castle which brought together many inspiring businesswomen and entrepreneurs. This morning I am very much looking forward to meeting some of them when I speak at Investing Women’s Ambition & Growth Conference, which is an excellent showcase for the rich and vibrant female-led businesses which thrive in Scotland.

We should celebrate the fact an unprecedented 351,000 women became self-employed in the first half of this decade and, with the huge amount of support around to help people start businesses today, that number will only increase.

Encouraging more women to start businesses isn’t only good for inspiring others, it has a massive positive impact on the economy too. The Royal Bank of Scotland calculated that boosting female entrepreneurship could deliver approximately £60 billion extra to the UK economy and the former prime minister, Gordon Brown, has said that if the UK could achieve the same level of female entrepreneurship as the US it would result in an extra three-quarters of a million businesses.

For women looking to start a business, there has never been a better time. Gone are the days of having to pitch awkwardly to a suited and booted bank manager who definitely isn’t your target market in order to receive a loan to make your idea happen. Now, thanks to crowdfunding you can go straight to the people who matter most – your customers – to help you raise the money to start your business. This allows women to reach out to the communities they create to get the funding they need. Or there’s the government’s Start-up Loans scheme of which Virgin StartUp is a delivery partner. The scheme gives loans from £500 to £25,000 to entrepreneurs looking to launch or grow a business under two years old and matches them with a mentor for 12 months. Since 2012 this scheme has lent more than £200m to help start more than 36,000 businesses.

The mentoring aspect of the Start-up Loan scheme is especially relevant for women. There are still industries and roles traditionally dominated by men – think of the old boys’ network in industries such as finance, for example, and the under-representation of women in science. While headway is undoubtedly being made in addressing these imbalances, mentoring helps speed this process through giving women a leg-up and levelling the playing field. Through mentoring, new female entrepreneurs can be empowered to push themselves and succeed, gaining confidence in their abilities, speaking up and driving change. And as many of our mentors are women too, hearing first-hand from the women who are changing the game is powerful – it sends the kind of message we need in order to get a whole new generation of female entrepreneurs on the road to changing the world.

I’ve also heard it said women “can’t have it all”. I don’t agree, in fact, one of the most obvious ways you can “have it all” would be to run your own successful business. Thanks to advancements in technology, you don’t have to work traditional hours and can instead base the business around your life. And in fact telling clients or customers that you’re running this business around raising children so aren’t available at certain times can have a positive impact. People buy into businesses with stories and the personalities behind them. No-one wants to buy from a faceless company any more and knowing the person running a business is also juggling the same priorities as you can be inspiring and a selling point and what better way to inspire our future leaders?

So on this International Women’s Day, I’d like to shout out to all the inspirational women that are paying themselves what they deserve, working under the ceilings they designed for themselves and employing the number of male or female employees they deem relevant to their brilliant businesses. Also, if it sounds like I’m talking about you, then I’d encourage you to mentor others and share your story as much as possible. There’s nothing more inspiring to females trying to start up, than a woman already running a successful business. The more female entrepreneurs we create, the more the gender clichés become less ingrained for future generations and the more Scotland’s economy prospers as a result of the many positives women bring to the boardroom.

• Mei Shui is managing director of Virgin StartUp and a keynote speaker at Investing Women’s Ambition & Growth Conference at Dynamic Earth, Edinburgh. • Twitter: @Investing_Women l Hashtag: #agconf16