The £50m women helping others build businesses

Size, in business, does matter and more women should be recognised for achieving it, according to an initiative from two leading entrepreneurs and EY, the accountancy firm.
Sam Smith, founder of the broker Finncap, and Rosaleen Blair, founder of Alexander Mann Solutions, the outsourced recruitment group known as AMS, have teamed up to showcase the women who have built businesses turning over £50 million, and to help others get to the same point.
Smith, 50, has called the initiative “Superscalers” and said the scale mattered because it was a point where the system designed to facilitate business growth, from the banks to private equity and institutional investors, started to take a proper interest.
“Superscalers is about increasing the number of people from under-represented backgrounds who are growing a business past £50 million. Size and scale is important,” she said. “There is something about approaching £50 million where you are a size where you could IPO [sell shares on the stock market], where private equity will look seriously at your business, and a size where you might go global.”
Smith and Blair have enlisted the help of EY to identify the women who have founded or co-founded businesses that have pushed through the £50 million mark and remain at the helm. They have come up with 45, including Anne Boden, founder of Starling Bank, and Chrissie Rucker, founder of The White Company, the retailer. “It is a tiny number,” admitted Smith, “but by showcasing this number we start building cohorts of women who can see what the challenges are and learn the lessons.”
To be considered by EY companies had to be founded or be led by women during the majority of their years of growth and still have a woman leading the business, or a predominantly female leadership.
The 45 come from a range of industry sectors, although 20 operated in consumer products and services. Twenty six were based in London and the southeast of England. Combined, their businesses generated an estimated £6.9 billion in value, EY said, noting that Denise Coates’s Bet365, the gambling firm, generated £3.4 billion in revenues on its own for the financial year ended in March 2023.
Smith’s plan for Superscalers is to invite women business owners from £1 million turnover to sign up to learn from each other and the women who are one stage ahead of them.
“If we can get 100 women building businesses past £50 million in the next six years that would make a material difference. Small changes here lead to massive changes further down. It encourages girls in school to think they can do it, women to start and those at £20 million to think they will push on.”
She said women in business needed to hear the message that reaching £1 million in sales was the hardest stage with it becoming easier after that point, so not to stop there.
“The message is that it will never, ever be that hard again,” she said. “To go from nothing to a million, you have doubled your revenues quite a few times — and it takes a long time. At a million in revenues men are five times more likely to build a business past that point than a woman. People stop there because it’s been so hard, you are broken.”