Bookshelfie: Women’s Prize Podcast - S1 Ep2: Women Mean Business

Episode Date: May 16, 2019

Fiction + Pioneers. Zing Tsjeng is back with this week's discussion at the Baileys Book Bar - Women Mean Business. A panel of jaw-droppingly impressive women sharing books, business tips, and stories of tough failures alongside huge successes. This episode shines a light on women reshaping the world of work today; with bestselling author and Women’s Prize for Fiction Founder Director Kate Mosse, founder of WAH Nails and Beautystack Sharmadean Reid MBE, Digital Entrepreneur and 2019 Women's Prize for Fiction judge Sarah Wood, founder of the Black British Business Awards Melanie Eusebe, and Jess Butcher MBE, tech entrepreneur and co-founder of Tick & Blippar. Books covered include: The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley Late Fragments: Everything I Want to Tell You (About This Magnificent Life) by Kate Gross Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead by Sheryl Sandberg A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf For more details head over to www.womensprizeforfiction.co.uk or check out #WomensPrize and @WomensPrize on Twitter and Instagram. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

With thanks to Bailey's, this is the Women's Prize for Fiction podcast, produced by Fremantle. Celebrating women's writing, sharing our creativity, our voices and perspectives, all while championing the very best fiction written by women around the world. I'm Zing Singh, at the Bailey's Book Bar, Waterstones, Tottenham Court Road, London. The cues are forming here in Waterstones, and we are all waiting for yet another impressive panel of women, bringing their experience, their talents, their perspectives to today's discussion. Women Mean Business. Best-selling author and founder-director of the Women's Prize, Kate Moss,

has pulled together some incredible individuals to talk about the female authors and books that played a part in their success and how women are reshaping the world of work today. Kate is joined by 2019 Women's Prize for Fiction Judge and Digital Entrepreneur Sarah Wood, founder of the Black British Business Awards, Melanie Yusebi. co-founder of Tick and Blipper, Tech Entrepreneur, Angel and Advisor, Jess Butcher MBE, and Sharmedine Reed MBE, founder of Warnails and Beauty Stack. Here we go. So has everybody got their bailies who wants one?

Yep, good. Ready for your ice cream at the end? Yes, hooray. So, are we doing a wave? Are you starting a wave, Melanie? I was the Bailey's wave. Oh, the Bailey's one. Excellent.

Fantastic. Whoa. Anyway, the point of the Women's Prize for Fiction was and is to amplify and to honour women's voices. And tonight we've invited four extraordinary women who have achieved great things in their own fields. And they're going to talk about what they've done and their successes and maybe some of their obstacles and their relationship with reading. And then they will share a book with you that they think you should all read. So I have immediately next to me a woman with many names, but I'm calling her Sharma.

read for this evening. Can you just say a little bit about your route into business and what you do and just, you know, tell us about your career? Sure. So I actually studied fashion communication and promotion. I was always obsessed with how people use, like, fashion and clothes and culture to share their social identities. That was always like my obsession. And then when I graduated, I started working as a stylist and trend forecaster and insights for Nike, ASOS, like Lee jeans and fun young brands like that. It was really amazing being 23 and flying all over the world doing these jobs. So at the time I was living a bit of a double life. I'd made a magazine at University.

So while I was at Centralist and Martins, I made a magazine called Wa. We Ain't Hoes, which was about women in hip-hop that were. either DJs or rappers, essentially not video girls, because I was trying to figure out my identity at the time, and I wanted that identity is to have clothes on it. So then I... That is a good lie. So I thought, you know what?

When I had the idea, I was like, I pay so much money to get my nails done. I'm going to open my own nail salon and create a better experience, and then naturally I'm going to call it Wao, because I've built this community of women on a blog in 2006. So I'm going to open a salon called Warnel. And I did that 10 years ago, actually, 2009, which is quite nutty. And it just took off.

And we really... A physical salon in Doulston, where I was living at the time. And what that did was really pioneer bringing Nail art to a mainstream audience. It kind of took over my life, so I stopped doing all the branding work. And then I just thought, what am I doing? I didn't... This wasn't my plan. for the first time in my life, because I've planned my life since I was 12 years old,

gone off plan, and I was like, what the hell? So then I kind of withdrew and spent 18 months thinking about what I wanted to do and what I enjoyed about that process. And I was like, I really enjoy helping girls make more money. I really enjoy the fast pace of beauty. I really enjoy beauty as a social connector. But really, I enjoy making women money. That was the fun part.

And I love technology. So I was like, I'm going to come back and build a software for the next generation of salons, because that's another thing that we pioneered was it was like a different type of salon. So fleshed out the idea, raise some funding, and Beauty Stack launched October last year. So what Beauty Stack is now, it's an app that is part social network, part marketplace. So instead of screenshoting a picture of those nails you want or the braids you want, You actually just click a picture and book it directly with the girl who did it. You pay for it and it goes into your calendar and theirs.

So this came from 10 years of while, people screenshoting thousands of photos of nails and saying, how much is this? How long did it take? Who did it? What is it? I was like, do you know what? Likes and reblogs don't put food on the table. It would be so much better if you could actually make money off this picture.

So we built it. That is all extraordinary. So it seems to me that underneath all of that is the idea of empowering individual women, yourself, but other people as well, to make money to be supported for what they're doing and to be able to survive outside of a structure. You know, you're making structures. I think when I started thinking about helping other people, as you say, is when I was 24 and Wa was a blog and I was travelling the world, like I said, people would say, how are you? like 23 and flying to New York on business class and I was like I don't know but then I was like no I do know let me tell you yes yes so then that's that's literally it it was more like I thought oh the things that I've done I actually can share and help other people do it and we actually did a panel

discussion before the salon even existed so this was in 2008 I did so long ago right 11 years ago I did a panel discussion at the ICA gallery where I literally got me and five of my friends to do nothing more than say how I got my job because everyone kept asking me how are you working for Nike so I did this, I did this, I did this and I had like Kate Maross

who's the graphic designer I had Sarah Lockhart who founded the radio station Rinks FM and I just had my friends saying this is how I got my job so I think it was more just like a desire that if I've got information I have to tell other people.

Yeah, yeah. Useful. If I've got useful information. Yeah, so that's role modelling, as my. Yes, usually. Well, I think you obviously have quite a lot of useful information, but it's actually that responsibility of sharing. That's really fantastic.

Beauty is very much like an industry that is consumed by women, but if you actually look at the ownership of the big beauty houses, the ownership is largely made up of men. If you walk down the aisle of boots, in the salon range. Every single product range is a male salon owner. So you have Nikki Clark, Charles Worthington,

Josh Wood, Giovanni, I can't remember them all. And then you walk down this whole aisle and there are all male salon owner names. You turn the corner into like the cute fun area and then you finally see Bleach London, which is a female owned salon company. And I've, like, the wealth in beauty

is created within the preemptive. product manufacturing, yet again, a place where women are consuming it and not actually creating or owning it. So I think unearthing these like inequalities within equity, ownership and economic independence is really important to me. Right. It's interesting because it's one step beyond, you know, you like taking care of yourself as a woman, you know, you feel empowered when you look good and you make yourself feel good, but you're also spending lots of money actually. And where's that money going to? I mean, that kind of highlights it.

You might make yourself look great and you feel great while doing it, but if the money's going into hands of a guy, really, how empowering can it be for you? Yeah, I mean, that's why I've chosen to focus on beauty stack because, firstly, you're economically empowering another woman, so that's really

powerful as a woman. We've got girls on our app who are able to move out of their houses because they now earn enough money to rent their own flat, you know? We've got essentially people who are putting food on the table and earning money that wasn't available to them before because of our app. And that is truly the mission of the company. But on a bigger macro level, when, like women have more money, it tends to go back into a local economy instead of financial products and services. So, you know, a woman who's got cash is likely to spend it locally where a man who has cash is likely to spend it locally, where a man who has cash is.

is like, I actually read a stat on this so I kind of want to try and remember it and back it up but it's something like women spend like 90% of their salaries on their families whereas men spend something like 40% of their salaries on their families because the rest of the money is going in higher pension schemes, you know, stocks and shares, financial services. So I think that helping women earn more money

doesn't just help them, it helps the economy as a whole and that's, you know, why is our money wrapped up invisible products when it should be going back into the community. So Sarah, you've had two rather different versions of working and one is entrepreneurial and one is sort of formal and very structured. So do you want to say a bit about that? Well, I never had much of a plan. But you're my hero, so it doesn't even matter. Well, I think, you know, I began as an academic. So I grew up loving reading. loving books,

loved writing, and just love, love kind of working. So I had led a bit of a double life in that I would spend a lot of time reading and writing, but then also a lot of time doing daft jobs that I really enjoyed. You know, dog walking, babysitting,

eggpacking was my first job, age 12. So I did that for about two weeks. Not great money. But from then on, constantly, you know, working, reading and choosing between the two has always been really hard. So I did go into academia. I was teaching literature at Sussex.

I did my PhD at UCL. Absolutely loved it. But kept taking gap years, partly because there's so much else out there. It's quite hard to commit to one thing. So I just tried lots with lots of different things. Love being an academic. But at a certain point, I had two kids, and I was an academic in Sussex, commuting between Hackney and Sussex.

And actually, just after I've had my second child, and I had to go and teach, leave the kids in Hackney. and it broke my heart every week to leave them. And I just thought this is crazy. I love teaching and I love researching, but I shouldn't have to leave the kids every week. So what else can I do? What else might be fun?

What else could be interesting? What else could make money? And that's when myself and my husband, who worked together on lots of little projects and had always wanted to do something kind of big and meaty together, decided that we're going to set up our own business. And we set up a company called Unruly. and it didn't know what it wanted to do.

We didn't have a clue. We had no plan. We didn't know anything other than that Web 2.0 was kicking off and we wanted to be part of it. We could see the blogosphere was just exploding. This is pre-Facebook, pre-Twitter. But there was a lot of social activity online, and that felt like a real opportunity.

So we started off. We built a website called Eat Myhamster.com, which was a comedy portal. The idea was people could upload funny jokes. It bombed. We killed the hamster very quickly. They only lived for two years anyway. This one lived for about two months and then it was game over.

But it did teach us a lot. It taught us that people love video. It also taught us that it was very hard to find what's hot. And it taught us that very early on. So our next project was called viral video chart. And the business model ended up being advertising. So lots of brands and agencies came to us and said, how do we get our content to go viral?

And how do we get our content seen by the right people in the right places. So we built out a distribution platform. We grew that so we have access to over a billion people globally. And we also had a lot of data and analytics that sat behind that. Why are people watching videos? What are the type of videos that appeal to certain types of people? Where will they watch them? When will they watch them? What will they go on to do next? And we found out that emotional impact was pretty much everything. What drives people to share? It's emotion. Strong emotion. Laugh out loud, hairs on the back of the neck. All kind of those emotional triggers get people sharing. And from that we built the business. We built it to over 300 people, 15 countries.

We took a series A in 2012. Up until then, we've been bootstrapped. We had to sell off that. And just kind of, we wanted to bootstrap for as long as we could. We really wanted to keep control of what we had because we could see it was exciting and we didn't want to give it all away too soon. And we were very lucky. We were able to build that business, build a fantastic team and build an incredible culture. And I think that's kind of what I've enjoyed most of building the business. We sold it in 2015 to News Corp. I stayed on to CEO the business for another three years. Now I'm chairing it. And in all that journey, kind of taking it from startup to scale up, to selling it to now as chairing in a non-exec capacity, what I found is the constant is if you've got

great people, you can do great things. And then the last year has been another example of that, working with the amazing judges and the Women's Prize for Fiction. Just having a pause now, so they're not doing too much. So you guys are all very busy doing lots. of things and I'm just kind of well if you don't mind me to say you've got a bit of reading to do if you don't mind me just what are the perfect moment but what is interesting just listening to the completely different starting points and motivations

but the one thing that is is common to both of you and it's interesting in a moment with Jess and Melanie to see if that's the same is the idea of okay I can do this I'm gonna do this I'm gonna try that there's a gap there, I'm just going to keep going. And so that sort of entrepreneurial spirit, I think, is really interesting. And I think we'll pick that up when we go along. There are some women who might freeze up at the idea of being asked to take on a leadership role. And maybe that has to do with our ideas of what constitutes a leader and what constitutes leadership. Do you think that our

idea of what it means to be a leader is changing and how can we stretch that definition so that more women can see themselves in it? I think that is such an important question. because absolutely there are many people and many women in particular who don't necessarily see themselves in leadership positions and feel quite frightened at that prospect. But that's because we have really outdated ideals of leadership and that are often males, swaggery, lone wolfish, and these just aren't leadership stereotypes that many women can relate to. So I think it's really important that we reframe the leadership discussion and what it means to be a leader. So lots of women take leadership roles already. They're running families. They are running teams. They're running

book clubs. They'll be running a lot in their lives. They'll have responsibility for so much, but they may not think of it as being a leadership position. So I think largely it's about saying, being a leader isn't about just about sitting at the top of an organisation or a board, wearing a suit, being draconian. I think leadership, effective leadership, especially today when we have rising generation, a very different type of workforce. Leadership today is much more about having empathy. It's about understanding the people around you. It's about giving continuous feedback.

It's about providing clarity. Fantastic communications so everybody understands where a business is going, what role they are playing in it each person individually, and then celebrating those moments when things go well. And a leader today needs to be digitally literate. They need to be emotionally literate. They need to have diversity IQ as well. So be aware.

that as they create a team, it really should be a team that's made up of different types of people from different backgrounds, different skill sets, and also different cognitive biases. A team just full of extroverts is certainly going to miss some things. You want some introverts, people who are scientifically minded who are more creative. So really appreciating the business importance of diversity, I think is absolutely key to today's leaders. And that's not something we've seen from leadership in the past. So the more diverse leaders of today are, the more likely we are to continue having that virtuous cycle and attracting different types of leaders into leadership roles. In Huffport recently, you talked about the idea of merging your home in work life as opposed to looking for that work-life balance, which to me personally seems kind of mad.

Can you explain how does that work for you? Listen, it doesn't work for everybody. And there is no right way of managing family life and professional life. And I think that's really important to recognise that. And as a parent, you already have so many pressures on you. But for me, being an entrepreneur, gave me the freedom to be able to create a workplace and a culture where I felt kids could come into the workplace and be welcomed. And they could come into the workplace and have a really nice time

and help our interception or just sit in the basement and play games. Whatever it was, it was important to me that my kids could come into work. And having dogs, pets around the office had the same effect. It just helped everybody to relax. And everyone felt they could be themselves. And we would laugh at silly things. And we felt really comfortable, being childish. And I'm a big believer that in a workplace, you need to feel safe to be able to do your best work.

And you need to be able to be playful and be silly sometimes. Just to free up those neurons. And having kids around and dogs around just encourages a little. little bit of silliness. So Jess, right, join in. I had no plan. I have, I've got one plan too I am a real weirdo with this. I am odd. But I guess if I was to say I still have no plan. I still don't know what I want to be when I grow up. And, you know, I've just turned 41. And, so very young. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I probably start by saying firstly, I have a split personality and I have two names. So Jess Butcher is my, obviously, name I was born with

my maiden name and my professional name, but I am now also Jess Simpson, my married name. And what's interesting about that is I also had this very dichotomous life in that Jess Simpson is the Hartfordshire mum of three children under five who lives in a village and is chaotic school mum. I has no idea what's going on. And Jess Butcher now is obviously the me that has, you know, been always, but it's become my professional name because I kept it because Jess Simpson, Jessica Simpson wasn't a very good name for Google, it was already taken, and I'd made my professional life before I got married. But what I love about that juxtaposition is that I really love putting on Jess Butcher now, and it actually happens on the train as I go from Hartfordshire into London.

I'm a weird tech entrepreneur because I understand nothing about technology, but what I have always been drawn to is disruptive business ideas. So anything that was challenging the conventional way in which consumers in particular did things, I would get excited about better ways, more delightful ways of doing things that made people's life better. And until my whole 20s, I had a horrifically ugly CV where I'd move jobs every 18 months, normally business development or sales, for different types of tech companies. And it was a CV that said, can't stick at anything,

can't be managed, gets bored easily, is susceptible to unscrupulous recruitment consultants, which is also true. And what I was doing with hindsight, I paid a lot of money to a career coach to make sense of my CV,

is I was, I just loved that sort of creative entrepreneurial experience. I was riding the cocktails of other entrepreneurs. And if I have any regret in my life, it's the fact that I did that for so long without jumping in and taking that risk myself. But I was always this frustrated, aspiring entrepreneur, and it took, you know, taking myself out of London and out of the rat race. And in a very unfeminist way, a man to help to be the catalyst for that. So I met my now husband, and we went to Africa for a year because I had fallen out with my latest manager. The job situation was no longer tenable.

I had to quit. Like, no longer tenable. Basically, I was about... Pistols adored him. I was three minutes from getting fired, so I had to jump. One of my ex-colleagues invited me to look at this new technology who was working on, and that conversation became my first big business, which was a company called Blipper,

which was one of the first companies in the field of augmented reality, which I'm sure you're all aware of. And what started as a pub chat between the four of us within four years had become a global pioneering technology company with over $100 million in fundraising, 400 staff across the world. I was on for that four years. I was so energized and I never realized how productive I could be.

I was doing so much and I was so invigorated by all of those challenges. And I loved it. And then I kept up. children. I had three and four years. Do you know how that works now? I do know how that works. Ironically, I had a business plan for my family. I wanted three, but I didn't think through the ramifications of actually what that meant. And so inevitably what happened is I found an idea again in the last year by accident and I fell in love with it. I love the people that were working on it. I really felt that I could help turbocharge that idea. So now I'm back at the bottom of the

I'm doing a startup again. It's called tick done. And it's a mission for me personally, because I am one of these tech entrepreneurs who's become very disillusioned with tech. I'm really nervous about the negative ramifications, particularly of too much content, too much time, addictions, narcissistic social media behavior, just the polarisation of debate and all of this clickbait algorithms. There's too much. And that's like, I know, get me on that soapbook, who won't get me off it. So I'm trying to build an antidote to that. A micro-video platform that teaches us how to do anything of a practical nature in less than a minute and gets us offline.

I just ask one thing you said about you'd seen a career coach to kind of make sense of your CV. Do you think that you were, I mean, it doesn't strike me like this is the answer, but I'm just interested. Do you think you were afraid of failing, which is why you didn't want to. to branch out on your own till later on, or do you think it was just that you were restless and you couldn't quite identify that restlessness as actually a powerful thing as opposed to a negative thing? You know, I think I probably, with hindsight,

I needed to have got to that, the age that I was, to have suddenly moved into a mode of... To see the story. What's the worst it can happen? You know, I don't care anymore. It's like with every year that I've aged, I just cared less about what other people think. It's called the effort 40s.

It's a superpower. It's a superpower. Indifference to other people's opinion other than those people that you love is a superpower. And I'm getting more powerful. Not how people view the work. Yes. Which, as a writer, that is the biggest liberation

for anybody who's a novelist or indeed any kind of writer is the moment at which the work itself is the reward, not what you get rewarded for the work. This podcast is made in partnership with Bailey's Irish cream. Bayleys is proud to shine a light on women and their achievements by getting more books written by truly remarkable women into the hands of more people. Bailey's is the perfect adult treat, whether in coffee, over ice cream, or paired with your favorite shortlisted book.

And now, back by popular demand, discover somewhere in a bottle with Bailey's strawberries and cream. So in my mind, the barriers that encourage women to explore and grow their ideas, for businesses are quite similar in the literary world as well as the business world. With that in mind, what would you say the main barriers might be and how can we, I guess, tear them down? Yeah, I think that the biggest barrier for any woman actually is themselves. I've always believed this. I witness it, I've observed it, I've suffered it from it myself, observing a lot of this, you know, reluctance to put oneself to put oneself forward to take significant risks, to jump into the unknown and I guess to put yourself into the arena.

Now how far that's innate or societally ingrained is a whole other question of debate. But it's definitely the case. And I've noticed it in business, I notice women applying for jobs when they can do 99% of the job spec, whereas a man might apply at sort of 40% speaking opportunities and an unwillingness for women to put themselves forward, to put themselves forward as mentors. and I guess overcoming that fear of failure and a certain amount of the confidence gap and imposter syndrome, I genuinely believe,

is the biggest barrier to any individual woman's progression. And I think, how do we resolve that? Well, I think firstly by acknowledging it and talking about it, and I think women find it very cathartic to hear other women saying that they have been subject to that and it helps to normalise it and encourage people to think outside of their comfort zone and what they might naturally be inclined towards.

And the other thing that I think does that very, very well is seeing role models of all shapes and sizes, doing well and enabling younger women to identify with them. I have certainly found role models very, very formulative to my own ambitions. And I aspire to do that for other people, without thinking I necessarily am the perfect role model, but I want people to know my flaws, my weaknesses, you know, the insecurities I've had,

and I guess what I've been able to achieve in spite of them. And, you know, there's still so many role models I have who I aspire to now. If there's a voice in your head that says, don't go for that, I've got a bad feeling about it, how can you tell if it's instinct and intuition that's guiding you towards the right decision or if it's your own insecurities holding it back?

Oh, that's, arguably it doesn't matter whether, which it is, that's holding you back. It's how you overcome that. You know, and I've always been quite influenced by the, you know, you always regret the things that you didn't do. And at the end of the day, what's the worst that could happen? You know, egg on your face or a little bit of failure, arguably a lot of the times when things haven't worked out for me have ended up being my most amusing dinner party stories and the experiences that I, I talk about more commonly because they have been the one that I, the ones that I've learned from.

But it's only by a process of having fallen flat on my face and done those sort of, oh, cringe-worthy things, you know, getting on stage and not knowing what I was talking about or having this sudden blushing attack or saying the wrong thing at the wrong time that, you know, I've grown and matured and just thought, really, it doesn't matter. If I don't try, I'll never know.

So, Melanie, you've been wonderfully patient. coming down the line, but listening to these amazing stories. So can you share yours and then we'll just have a bit of a general chat? So just to explain my accent, I was born here in North London, but then raised in Canada in Toronto. And I came back here 15 years ago. It was really hard actually moving to Canada from the UK. I think that's part of why sort of the business that I did

because I've had a very strong Cockney accent. I know you can't picture it. But I did, and there's a report card on my mom's wall that says that Melanie is very antisocial. She's very reserved, and she doesn't speak. And she has to go into English as a second language courses for her to be, you know, for her to be able to communicate. That was the first time of many times where her mother had to go in and yell at the teacher, yell at the students or yell at the kind of the administration of school. And she fought for me when I didn't know any better, you know, when I was taking

piano lessons. And she was like, Mel, teach me, you know, tell me what, you know, song you're learning in your piano class. And I would sing to her, soft white hands on the white piano keys. And I just remember her face turning. And I remember, I think I must have been seven, but you know when your mom's upset and I was like, oh, no. I didn't know what I had done. And then I just realized what, you know, what had happened that she, I remember her just yelling at my, my music teachers and going to the principal's office when I was about to fail for grade nine mathematics. again, really important time where she's like, look, my child is brilliant. She was educated partly in the British school system, the best in the world.

Don't tell me that something's wrong with that teacher. And she also kicked my backside at home, of course, and said, look, you're not allowed to read anything. You're not allowed to read a book. You are doing math. You're doing math for the rest of your life. I joke about that, but actually, I wasn't even allowed to. I loved books. It's such a privilege to be here tonight.

I loved them. They were my escape. from, you know, we didn't live in the best neighborhood, and I escaped the books. Mom was like, dude, you're going to work on math. So I worked on math. And so I went from failing math to graduating, and I went to a pre-med program at University of Toronto in high school. And so what that taught me, what my mother knew, and I didn't know, was that she had the growth mindset. She was like, you need to work your backside off and grab onto it and hold on to it. And that's why the Black British Business Awards and working on the Women of the World Festival, my whole life has been about that.

It's been about empowering people and making sure they understood and they realize just that potential that's within them. And so a few years ago started the Black British Business Awards because I just wasn't happy. I saw all these, I'm not going to lie, I'll tell you honestly, I moved here and I loved British tailoring. and I just saw all of these dope British men with their dope British tailoring. And I was like, what's going on here? Dope British black men walking down the road. But then when the riots happened, I didn't see any of those people. I saw a lot of people kind of not really speaking to the real issues at hand and a lot of these angst.

And it got me really upset. And so I thought, you know what, guys, there is a lot of black British that we are not seeing. You're not seeing the depth and the breadth and the breadth and the width of us. You're not seeing, you're not letting us. I don't, and my famous quote was, I think it was in the Evening Standard, when I meet a, like, I don't judge white people by what comes out of Nigel Farage's mouth. So why on earth are you going to judge me and judge my whole race based on what I do or what someone else does? And it's the same thing for women. Like I don't understand how we do this. And so with the Black British Business Awards started famously with two white women. And now that was big time because feminism wasn't intersectional. now or then. And so for me to start that with, I took the learnings from when I was fighting for gender, and then I brought in my experience as a black woman, and then I was able to accelerate and create a program that now, you know, it's great, like going to Buckingham Palace and meeting the Queen,

and Richard Branson, he supports our wards and he does our videos for us. And to say that, you know, we have Futsi 100 companies, so about 40 of them. And for that to be black, that was before Black Panther. before the Avengers, before we weren't allowed to say it. We weren't allowed, like that wasn't part of our identity. And so to know that that was part of that, in terms of that comfort level, I can, that's what I guess I'm most proud of. And it's about everyone having equal opportunity

to make as much of themselves as they possibly can, to make as much money. No matter where I traveled in the world, does it matter, Brazil, Australia, the U.S., the darkest people suffer. the most. Sri Lanka. So I'm never going to take, I'm never, I'm not bowing away from the blackness. I'm not going to be A&E. And so that's why I think that there's still a lot of work to be done because it's a global problem. And then also on the gender side, women's voices, no matter

where I went, again, was it Sri Lanka or was it Brazil or was it the US and Canada? Women only, it didn't matter which race, color, gender, like it didn't matter where. where they were from, didn't matter what part of the country they were from, we only want three things, we want equal opportunity, we want equal pay, and we want safety for ourselves and our children. That's it. It's really easy. And so if I bring it right back down to that, then that's why I try to foster that and everything I do in regards to. I'm a business professor now, and I focus on that economic empowerment, kind of in individuals asking for a pay rise, you know, just knowing how to do a budget, being comfortable when you choose service providers,

those kinds of things. And I really want women to really feel that, because we're being, yeah, we're being sidelined, our stories, our voices, we end up poor and alone. That's what our research is telling us. We pay for all of our children. You pay for our husbands. They die before us. And we usually end up with our girlfriends. No, I'm not even joking, guys. It's like all the insurance companies that I've all read reports. And so that's my mission, economic empowerment. For anyone listening who may not have heard why diversity in business in the boardroom is so important, could you outline the benefits of making those spaces open to a wide range of people?

Well, I think that if we look at the data, it's clear that diversity is not just something that's good to do, but it's actually a moral imperative out of a business imperative. We now know, according to research, that diverse teams are more productive. They make more money. Businesses make more money when they have diversity at the helm. Additionally, now we're finding that there are so many competitors on any given marketplace that the competitive advantage that is allowed for in regards to creativity, innovation, all of those things fostered by diversity and inclusion,

then it makes a business come out in front. So quite frankly, it's not a nice to have anymore. Diversity and inclusion, we're seeing the best businesses in the world, the most, the profitable business in the world are diverse and inclusive all the way from the beginning of the pipeline, all the way up to the top in the boardroom. It kind of sums up that really beautiful phrase, which I love, which is called, you know, a seat at the table. That's what everyone wants a seat at the table.

Exactly, exactly. And it's something certainly more than, I would say it's a leap past, inclusion. It's about belonging. It's about being able to bring your whole self to the table and be celebrated for it rather than it being an assimilation process or a role model at the top that only a very few of us can even aspire to. You've talked about the importance of amplifying the black narrative. So what part can literature and books play in speeding this process up? literature and books are fundamental in terms of the narrative, then the access to stories and storytelling. I am a huge advocate of the storyteller.

Now I think of all of the voices that are silent, so that not just about black people, but just of course, disabled people, you know, LGBTQI, you're not hearing their voices, we're not seeing their stories. And what's happening now is that we're running out of ideas, quite frankly. like we were going on movies are sequeling for days you know but when now when you're looking at some of these new authors that are coming up some of these voices that we're giving platform to you're seeing just whole worlds whole vistas opening up to us so it's really exciting and it's key that we include all voices at the table but particularly i would say as a black woman um that someone said it to me that you know when when a black woman is free then we are all free

And we have a huge ancestry of advocacy, a huge ancestry in terms of our thoughts are the basis of feminist culture today. And so I do think that there is something about the lever or a lynchpin that is found in black women and their narratives. And so the thing I think that you all have shown in different ways and the different choices you've made and the different companies or businesses or ideas or campaigns that you do is that entrepreneurial. spirit, which is about removing yourselves from a structure that might not have been built for women in the first place, whether it's about children, whether it's about feeling free, whether it's about knowing yourself. So would you all define yourselves in terms of business as entrepreneurs rather than business women? Or do you not need to define yourselves more than your Sharma and your Sarah and your Jess and your Melanie? It was really tough with the

entrepreneur thing because I was like, you could only be called an entrepreneur if you've done it more than once. That's so interesting. No, I thought, but then I just thought, oh, you know what, actually, Mali, you're doing that woman thing sometimes that we do that we have to have this very precise definition. Before I claim it on my CV, I've had to do it absolutely perfectly, 50,000 times. So I was reluctant, but now definitely I know that that's okay. Actually, for me to work for another company, I'm, my friend, my mentor, Jude Kelly, she told me this. She's like, you are best when you do not work for somebody. You are best. You are the trusted advisor on the side. You are a guide from the side. You are a sage from the stage, but you are not an employee.

And I was like, good. And that's when I left the South Bank Center. I remember. I remember. Exactly. Exactly. Well, I think that's true. I think, you know, a bit of a synonym for entrepreneur is unemployable. Because a lot of entrepreneurs, and we We're entrepreneurs precisely because we want to do our own thing. We have strong opinions. We enjoy building a business and a structure and a culture, and that's the fun of it. Of course, lots of entrepreneurs are successful business people.

It's an interesting definition and difference that you bring up. But I strongly identify as an entrepreneur, but that's because maybe if you're quite individualistic as well, and you like the idea of pioneering, going out there and doing something and building something, having that entrepreneurial label gives you kind of the confidence. Actually, I find the label, once you kind of feel comfortable with the label, it gives you a real confidence. A bit of swag, and a bit of swag, and a bit of freedom as well, because entrepreneurs come in all shapes and sizes.

Do you think of yourself as an entrepreneur? Or is it just you don't need to define it? Yeah, I guess I don't think so much about the definition, but if I would, I'd be more drawn to being a founder. Right. I feel like I've found a lot of things, whether I, you know, we started a girl business workshop called Future Girl Corp, and I wouldn't say that was entrepreneurial because it wasn't for me or anything,

but I would say I'm a founder of things. But I would agree that it's a pioneering spirit that, you know, leads you to go out and conquer stuff. But yeah, I would say in the same way that I could found a business, I could found a town, or a small step. or a literary prize. You know, I mean, I think that is actually... Yeah, because you're founder.

Yeah, but actually I think, you know, one of the things about the Women's Price of Fiction and anybody in the audience or any of us who are writers is that it is that peculiar balance between, in a way you are an entrepreneur, and that you're, you know, all of the things you're talking about, that moment of excitement when an idea came to you,

that is what it feels like at the beginning of a book when you think, oh, yeah, actually, if I can nail this story, then that, and so that's the same, and it's not writing somebody else's story. But I like Pioneer. I think Pioneers are a pretty good name. And you know what as well? I like visionary. I think, I was having this discussion with my girlfriends last week.

We were discussing about how we're in a large group and that a boy in a group would quote a book and everyone would think of him as a visionary. Excellent. But, you know, that the same respect was an afforded her as a writer. And I said, my, I really believe that language and words are so potent and powerful and violent and, you know, very, very, there's this such powerful thing that we should be really, really specific and careful in the words that we use to describe other people and particularly other women. and I was like, when was the last time you described, so us, you know, I was like, us in this, like, brunch, when was the last time you described another girl as a visionary

or a genius or a pioneer? Or, you know, if you start using this language more with women, then people will see women in this way. I think there are going to be a lot of questions. So actually, what I'm going to do is slightly turn our normal session on the head. And I'm going to take some questions now because I feel that you've said so many interesting things, and I imagine there are a lot of questions you want to ask.

So if you've got questions, put your hand up and ask you a question. Lovely. Lady there. Thank you. Hello. Thank you so much for sharing. And actually with my business partner here, we have started a newsletter to promote female leadership in the publishing industry. It's called The Flip. We're just starting out and we're just kind of scrambling to keep up with everything. It's been much more work than we naively expected it to be.

And I just wondered if any of you have. had any advice that you wish you'd been told right at the beginning when you're starting your first businesses? Oh, very good. Any advice that you would give your young selves or indeed these guys? Jess. I would say one of the biggest things which I does tend to polarise some people but I firmly believe it myself is fake it till you make it. And that is particularly really prescient for women who second-guess themselves more typically and think, well, is there any, you know, that's not going to work. And you put your head down and you just try everything and make as much happen as you possibly can. And it's only by doing that that you kind of understand.

And I think with any small business, you have to project where you want to be, not where you are. And that's really ridiculous. And it becomes self-fulfilling. You know, talk about what you're doing as if you're six months down the line. I'm not saying lie about the data or the achievements that you have had, but you talk very much about vision and where you're going in order to attract adherence, followers,

investors or whatever you're trying to attract to your cause. It's all about vision, not we want to do this, we're thinking about doing that, we are going to do this, this is what it would look like, this is how it's going to appear to people, this is how it's going to change people's perception, life, whatever.

What I wish people are told me when I started my first business, which is slightly contradictory to what Jess is saying is have a very clear monetisation plan from the get-go. Even if you don't execute on that plan immediately and you spend the time to build up your network and your readership, still understand a mechanism because it really helps you focus and do it a little bit every day that validates that goal. So you might say, you know, something ridiculous like. Like, not ridiculous, but great and ambitious, which is, you know, we want people to pay 20 pounds a year for this newsletter.

And every single thing you do will be like, how are we getting closer to getting 20 pounds a year? Oh, actually, we have a 75% open rate. So let's test with five pounds a year, you know what I mean? And then my second piece of advice. So to have really clear focus and know how to build a business model, because as a woman, I feel like people go much harder at you on the metrics and the data. So then my second piece of advice would be to constantly quickly test. So agree, try loads of things out, but measure them.

So the early days of your business are truly about experiments. It's like a science experiment. I think this is going to happen. I'm going to test it this way. And here's what we learnt. I didn't do that a while. I tried loads of random stuff and didn't have any focus. Can I add one thing to that as well?

Which is doing it with people that you really trust and can depend on is absolutely critical. So I would just add to that. Be really careful. Choose your company carefully. Choose your co-founders, your early employees, the people that you want to work with, your suppliers, because you'll have a lot more fun and you'll get a lot further if you've chosen a good crowd of people. And if you're starting with friends, so I started with my business, the BlackBordid Business Awards with a woman that I just did not know.

know. But I also started with two women that I did know and thank God for the fact that we had the same kind of vision. We had the same work ethic. So there was no looking and there's a point when you do look at each other and say, are you carrying the weight that you should be carrying, particularly in that partnership? And it can erode away the whole foundation. Additionally, I always now, because the industry has changed so much, I would say that for women, particularly I'd want you to focus more on branding and more. marketing and kind of market positioning. And the reason why I say that is because sometimes we like to work away in our hole and say, if we build it, they will come. No, look at the fire festival. You don't have to build anything and they still will come. They will still come. You have to build anything, my friends. So there, unfortunately, or fortunately, there is a whole thing around, there's such an importance on your brand and your market. And it goes right back into, it's a circle now rather than being kind of isolated events. And what I mean by, that is that with your branding and your marketing, it will influence your price, it will influence

your delivery, it will influence, like, how much people are paying for it. So I'm so glad, again, that I had people who said, Mel, this is a premium brand, therefore it means this, this, this is part of your business model. And that means that I was able to charge 40,000 pounds for sponsorship, rather than saying, oh, you can get a table for 25 towns. No, it's not going to work. So those kinds of things, particularly if you're taking me at newsletters, that if you start off with the right brand, all of a sudden, you can be charging people for stuff just to, you know, like big time. So yes, I would say that. And I would say just from the point of the Women's Prize, and since you're in publishing and all of these things,

that separate the vision from the detail. So the Women's Prize had a vision, which was to amplify and honor women's voices. And it's written by women for everyone, so it's a prize looking out. And that's the big story. The little story is, let's do this today and achieve that. and then do that tomorrow so that you don't get downcast, that you haven't yet achieved the vision, because you have actually achieved all the little things.

And just to sort of make the point here about the thing, then she's going to kill me for doing this. The managing director Harriet Hastings is in the front row. He was also a brilliant entrepreneur, self of Biscoteers. But actually, the prize wouldn't exist if we actually hadn't been doing it together. And there are lots of other people involved. But there is always the moment when you have to have the person that you can bounce ideas back off.

go, are we mad about this? Is this right or wrong? And that, I think, is for everybody. It's the putting the people around yourself that makes it possible to achieve the vision. Because otherwise, you don't know if you're just talking to yourself. Yes. And that's really important, I think. I am so sorry to say that we are so fast running out of time, because you are all incredibly interesting and inspiring. I want you to explain to us in like two sentences, Why you chose these books? Because normally, obviously, we are here to celebrate women's voices, but this is also part of it.

The Women's Prize is a platform for women's voices in all areas. Every type of woman reads. It's an amazing thing to actually be celebrating business and women working a different thing. But I would say that women writing women's prizes, we are entrepreneurs too in a different sort of way. So normally we put the books at centre stage, but I think this has been so brilliant to listen to all of you.

But we can't ignore the books. So can we do the elevator pitch? This is why you chose the book, bam, all along the line. Mel, go, you go. Okay, so my book is The Miss of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley. It's the story of King Arthur and his knights, but told from the feminine perspective. I read it when I was 15 and reread it again

as part of my feminist theory master's degree. Later on, I brought it back out. and it was a joy. So it totally changed my world. Even seeing it, I teared up because you don't realize as a child, even as a young woman, that you're reading everything through a lens. And this was the first piece of writing, a piece of anything, where I was like, wait a minute, the voice that's writing it,

it's not necessarily the only voice. And so it taught me that fiction or nonfiction, but the storytelling element is so important. Like, you don't talk about Gwendovir, you don't talk about, you know, made merry, you don't hear anything about them. You just hear the centrality around King Arthur and his knights of the round table. But when you, it's all about the women and it's such a glorious book. So if you like Game of Thrones or anything like that, then this is, you'll get lost in it.

It's epic. It's joyful. Brilliant. So you're on the 10th floor. Right, Jess, where is your elevator getting to? My book is Late Fragments by Kate Gross. Yeah, so you've read it. This is just a beautiful book.

It is not one that you read. It's one that you kind of drink and absorb. And I don't believe in reading books twice because there's too many of them in this world, and I've read this book three times and three years. And I believe that I'm going to read it every year for the rest of my life because it's a reminder of everything that's important and precious in life. It's a short read.

It takes three, four hours. Context is it was written by a 36-year-old woman who was dying of cancer, knew she was dying of cancer, but it's not one of those books, by the way. It is a beautiful memorial to everything that's precious in life. She wrote it for herself to prove as her body was dying that her mind was not, and that she had this literary passion, and it's incredibly affecting. She's a woman just like me, kids are the same age, and I have to add, she was also a friend of mine. Oh, was she?

I didn't know. It's a wonderful book. Ann, I love it. Yeah. Okay. Thank you very much. Sarah. So a very different book.

Controversial. Shell Sandberg, lean in. But, you know, for me, this was the book that took the conversation viral. The conversations about women's leadership, the issues that we have. Why don't we have more women leading? What can we do about it? It synthesized a lot of the data. So when I first read this, some of the data in here was fresh to me.

Data around likability and leadership. the data around how actually negotiating if your female can backfire on you. So I found it really, really helpful, just getting all this data in one place. She also shares experiences and anecdotes that are very personal, and I enjoyed that as well. She speaks her truth, and you won't agree with all of it, but I like the fact that she is a strong female tech leader who speaks her truth, and a lot of what she says has, even though the book sometimes gets bad press, A lot of the ideas have really taken on in life of their own,

such as your partner is the most important decision that you will make, and having a quality in the home is as important as quality in the workplace, such as authentic leadership is incredibly important. Thank you. Sharma. I chose Virginia Woolf, a room of one's own, because I only read it for the first time last year, and it's one of those things where the title has become like a meme, right? Like we all know the phrase, a room of one's own.

But when I read it, it was so overwhelming. It blew my mind. I was like every girl should be made to read this because what it's about is almost like what I was saying earlier is about how do we create women who are referred to as geniuses? Well, they need a room. And actually, the full line is what a woman needs money and a room of one's own.

And we've all mentioned economic empowerment in different guises. and what she's doing is creating, firstly, it's incredible to, it's just inside someone's head. It's like them talking to themselves, well, what about this and what about that? And have you thought about this? And so the style is beautiful. But actually what it uncovers is systematic oppression of women's creative capabilities. And why there is no Shakespeare's, what would happen to Shakespeare's sister? Why Shakespeare a man and not a woman?

well, you know, a woman would be in the home caring for the children and doing this and doing that. And the understanding of patrons, the understanding of financial independence and all of these things that are very, very defined power structures that have existed to oppress women and what we should be doing to break them. But also the difficult questions, like you said about the stay-at-home mum, you know, would you be happy not existing because your mum went to work instead of bearing children? Would you be okay sacrificing yourself so that a woman could run a business? So I just found this so overwhelming. I absolutely loved it. And that's rather wonderful because actually the women's prize was set up precisely to give women the possibility to exist as writers in their own right. And the prize money was deliberately big enough for a woman to buy a woman a year worth of writing.

So that is a fantastic way to finish. These women have shared extraordinary stories. will all have your own stories. The way we support other women is when we find somebody wonderful or hear something brilliant, we tell other people about it. When I was setting up the prize, the best piece of advice I was given was by the great Helena Kennedy, who said to me, The Thing is Kate, ask people to do things, but never put the phone down if you can't say yes without recommending another woman. Ladies and gentlemen, this has been an amazing panel. I'd like you to thank Melanie, to thank Jess, to thank Sarah,

to thank Sharma, to thank you all very much to our sponsors, the wonderful Baileys for the book bar to Fremantle and Nat West, to everybody involved here. The bar is now open and the ice cream is available. Thank you very much. Thank you. I don't know about you, but personally

I found that such an inspiring and energising discussion. I really loved hearing Sarah and Shamadine address the power behind the words we use to describe ourselves. And I especially love the way they used the word pioneer. I mean, that word can be used to describe so many women touched by the prize.

I'm Zing Singh, and you've been listening to the Women's Prize for Fiction podcast, produced by Fremantle, live from the Bailey's Book Bar. And that subscribe button, just there on your iPad or smartphone or whatever you're listening to us on, is just waiting to be clicked. So go ahead so you don't miss any of our episodes and help us zoom up the charts by rating and reviewing us. It's a small act that can help the authors we've talked about find an even bigger audience. And thank you for listening.