A look at the line-up | Four weeks until Ambition Nation: Female Leaders

With four weeks to go, we take a look at what’s in store for finnCap’s next event Ambition Nation: Female Leaders Series – Think Big, Be Bigger, including some exciting new speakers.

It’s fair to say that every entrepreneur thinks big – that they have ambition – but when the time is right, do they think bigger still?

When you’ve banked that investment you need, is it then that you rest on your laurels? Or is this the critical point to think about using that boost to propel your company to the next stage of growth?

And what about if you’re a female founder? What other obstacles might stop you reaching for that next stage, and the stage after that, and the stage after that?

Barriers to growth

These are the issues we’ll discuss in four weeks’ time. finnCap will welcome an audience of some of the UK’s most ambitious female entrepreneurs to Ernst & Young’s headquarters in London’s bustling business centre, Canary Wharf, to hear from and be inspired by female business success stories that have experienced or are currently experiencing all levels of growth.

finnCap’s Ambition Nation: Female Leaders Series event, in association with EY and Memery Crystal, fittingly subtitled Think Big, Be Bigger, will feature a prestigious line-up of influential entrepreneurs. As finnCap CEO Sam Smith describes below, we’ll be discussing challenges to growth from a range of issues such as how to inspire a business confidence that embraces that ‘Be Bigger’ mentality.

Watch the video below, as finnCap CEO Sam Smith describes what she hopes our delegates will take away from this event:

Time at the top

Further to previous announcements on our line-up, sure to be a highlight is our session on what ambition means to women at what many would see as the height of success. Our ‘Being Big: The Unicorn Story’ discussion will be guest-hosted Executive Editor of Hub Culture and former Bloomberg journalist Edie Lush.

And we are delighted to welcome Dame Helena Morrissey DBE to speak at this session. As Head of Personal Investing at Legal & General Investment Management and the former CEO of Newton Investment Management, Dame Helena is one of Britain’s most renowned and respected entrepreneurs; she is also the founder of the 30% Club, which campaigns for more women to be on the boards of FTSE100 companies, with a target of 30% representation. Indeed as our last Ambition Nation report demonstrates, there have been significant strides to this end of late, as big companies are finally realising their fundamental need to diversify the boardroom.

Joining Dame Helena on the panel is Jess Butcher, Co-founder and Director of Blippar, a true British technology scale-up success story.

Jess has received countless accolades as an entrepreneur, motivational speaker and champion of female entrepreneurship, including being named amongst the BBC’s Top 100 Women and Fortune’s Most Powerful Female Entrepreneurs lists.

And finally to this panel we welcome Joanna Santinon, Partner and Lead of the EY Women’s Network, and also a member of 30% Club Steering Committee, who will share her thoughts and experiences of female representation at board level in a multinational corporation.

All stages of growth

As we’ve discussed previously, the obstacles and barriers to female leaders at all stages of growth can be remarkably similar; our audience members will hear inspiring discussions from numerous areas of business and will likely recognise comparable scenarios from their own lives.

Our start-up session will hear from female founders including Shelley Hoppe, CEO of marketing agency Southerly, that are relatively new to seeking investment, and the kind of investors like Clare Madden, Managing Partner at early-stage investors Connection Capital, that are particularly attracted to investing in their class of CEO.

The Thinking Bigger session follows our start-up discussion and focuses on how a business shifts from the incredibly fast-growth early stages to the slower pace of a business growing roots whilst still maintaining momentum. finnCap CEO Sam Smith joins the panel here with Lesley Gregory, Chairman of Memery Crystal and Linzi Boyd, branding expert and Co-founder of BoB School, who will share her thoughts on how brands can ensure their endurance.

The Challenges to Scale discussion will then hear from Irene Graham, CEO of The ScaleUp Institute, and Sahar Hashemi OBE, Founder of Coffee Republic and from the Scale Up Taskforce, who will share their expert insights into what’s driving and holding back the UK’s scale-up community, and what advice they can offer to those embarking on their own growth journey.

For female entrepreneurs already thinking big, this Ambition Nation event will inspire that next-level thinking to be even bigger.

Download the finnCap guide Delivering a great pitch here.