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“From the moment I get into the room, I make my audience feel really uncomfortable. They stare at the ground and fiddle and they can’t wait to get out of there.”
Valentina Milanova, 28, is talking about the challenges of being a young woman trying to run a business in the UK. She’s the founder of the women’s health start-up Daye, a fast-growing company developing new period care products and pioneering technology that can test for infections and other female health conditions.
Since she launched the business in 2018, she’s taken it from the germ of an idea to a profitable and expanding organisation, already employing 45 staff and on the cusp of opening a new US arm. In her first year she raised more than £4m in seed funding.
Now, Milanova is raising new funds to support the next phase of her business plan. The problem? Most second-stage venture capitalists are middle-aged men, and they really don’t want to be talking about periods with a woman young enough to be their daughter.
“I struggled with the amount of men that were in the room and couldn’t relate to the problems I was solving,” she says. “That’s my biggest fundraising challenge.”
Not only were meeting rooms dominated by men, but Milanova says the few women she encountered were worried about backing Milanova only to be sidelined themselves. “It can be harder to raise from female investors because there are so few women in venture capital that they’re really worried about being pigeonholed as ‘the woman who invests in female founders’,” she explains. “The industry is such where they can’t afford to be seen as too feminine or too interested in women’s issues.”
Milanova is no outlier – her experiences seem to be typical for a young, female entrepreneur.
The Government’s Rose review into women in business, led by NatWest chief executive Dame Alison Rose, recently reported a sharp rise in the number of women setting up new British businesses, with the fastest rise among young female entrepreneurs. Women under 25 set up 17,489 businesses last year, compared with only 785 in 2018. The review also found that “breaking down boundaries” faced by female entrepreneurs would potentially boost the economy by £250bn.
Those boundaries, sadly, often include negative attitudes about women in business – particularly young women. In the US, only 2.3 per cent of venture capital funding went to female-led businesses in 2020. Here in the UK, things aren’t much better: research published earlier this month found that half of female entrepreneurs are rejected when applying for business loans. Accessing finance is even more difficult for businesswomen of colour, with more than two-thirds of Black women finding the process of funding their business challenging, according to a survey carried out by financial firm Tide.
“It’s a triple whammy for me because I’m female, young and Eastern European,” says Milanova, who was born in Bulgaria. “I’m just not supposed to be here, basically.”
The Daye founder describes her youth as “a really serious detriment” to how she is received by suppliers and investors. “I can’t wait to turn 30 because I will be treated differently and seen differently,” she says, exasperated. “It doesn’t matter at the end of the day how old or young you are, what should matter is what your beliefs are [in your business], and what your work ethic is.”
Other young business leaders report facing exactly the same challenges. Natalie Enslow, 29, was a promising junior executive working at Rolex when she quit the traditional career path to set up the skincare brand Fjor just two years ago.
“It was an amazing place to learn but it wasn’t mine,” she says of her time with Rolex. “I couldn’t really be proud. I felt like my success was more on the back of a big brand, rather than growing something myself and I really wanted to do something on my own,” she says.
So Enslow took the money she had received from an insurance claim after she was burgled, and funds from a loan she had taken out to buy a Rolex to wear to work, and used it to start her business instead. “My mother is Asian and she was very upset with me,” Enslow says with a laugh. “I had such a strong vision and I knew what I wanted to do. I had this idea at the start of 2021 in January. It was a seed planted and by March it had outgrown the pot, so it was quite a whim but I thought, if I don’t do it now I’ll never do it.”
By the summer of 2021 she had a business plan and branding finalised and was ready to find a research and development partner with which to design her product range – and that’s when the rejection emails started.
“You have to send out 100 cold emails to get one back. I knew it would be difficult but I was quite determined to say I don’t want this to be about what gender I am. I wanted to really push the barrier, and the brand itself is gender neutral,” she says.
To help her get through these early challenges Enslow took advice from other female founders. She also found a few of her own coping strategies for those daunting moments when she was negotiating with “a room full of 10 men”. These tricks include using the word “we” to describe her business, even though at this point she’s still the only full-time employee of the company. “It becomes less personal in those settings in negotiations, and it really takes away that element of them saying no to me as a person,” she says.
“And nobody can underestimate the power of having due diligence done before entering a meeting. I know I’m basing all my decisions on fact, and I’m not afraid of saying no and putting my foot down.”
Her persistence paid off and Fjor’s primary product, a hydrating skin serum, is making consistent weekly sales. Enslow is now seeking retail stockists for her luxury brand while developing a wider range of products to take to market.
But an ingrained cultural image of what an entrepreneur looks like is still holding women in business back. In an experiment to mark International Women’s Day earlier this month, communications consultancy One Green Bean used AI technology to generate images of competent senior business leaders. The result was a series of pictures of men in suits, significantly underrepresenting women in leadership roles.
Kat Thomas, founder of One Green Bean, said the project demonstrated how AI held “a mirror up to society, demonstrating that ingrained cultural biases dictate the norms that machine intelligence currently relies on.” And what does that look like? White, male and middle aged.
“A distinct gender bias is very evident, with favourability consistently skewing male,” Thomas explains. “That’s not the only bias either. When you do include ‘woman’ in your key words, imagery tends to be sexualised – big boobs, unbuttoned shirts, pouting lips.”
The effects of that deep bias are felt by people like 25-year-old wellness entrepreneur Emma Regan, who started her business, The Nourishment Academy, from her mum’s barn in Surrey during lockdown. Her business has now expanded to two gyms and an online nutrition coaching business, employing eight people.
Regan’s business grew organically, with her initially taking on her own clients for part-time support, for administration and other functions. Soon she was ready to hire other trainers and to set up another centre in a new location. Yet when she went searching for a suitable space for her second fitness centre, she found letting agents didn’t share her confidence in the potential of her business to grow.
At first she was turned down for four different sites without the agents even asking to look at her figures. “I assume that’s because they’ve looked at me and thought ‘no, thank you’,” she says. Then when she had finally found the right site for her second gym, she was faced with another negotiation in which agents tried to use sexist language to intimidate her into increasing her rent by £6,000 a year.
“I’ve always been challenged more with my age than my gender,” Regan explains. “But taking on this unit in Dorking, I was actually called by the agent and he said ‘let’s not get into little girl playground stuff’ when they were trying to up the rent.”
Regan, a former newspaper marketing executive, was not fazed by this challenge. “I’ve been presenting to a room full of white middle-aged men since I was 16, so it’s not something that I see as an issue,” she reflects, “but I do wonder if you become more accustomed to being judged for your age because you’re a woman.”
However, women like her are having the last laugh – with those under 25 now the driving force in British female entrepreneurship. Many are creating businesses that operate in a way that suits them and their lives rather than the historic expectations of men and the market. Regan, who has set up her organisation to allow her the flexibility to travel regularly, shares her thoughts while packing her bags for a three-week retreat in Thailand .
If funders, suppliers and contractors can’t meet these young women’s ambitions, they will be the ones missing out on the profits these businesses are making. “We’ve done it once, we proved six months later that we can do it again. Next, we’ll be doing it on a bigger scale,” says Regan.
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