The Impact of the Pandemic and Access to Capital for Women Entrepreneurs, With Debbie Wosskow and Anna Jones

🎙Debbie Wosskow and Anna Jones were introduced in 2015 by a mutual friend, and found they had a common passion around empowering women. They quickly identified a need for professional female networking, which is why they left their CEO jobs and created AllBright, a professional community for smart-minded women.

💸At the heart AllBright is the belief that women need to support one another, to help make the world a better place for smart-minded women to collaborate, upskill and achieve their career ambitions.

💥Today on The Wallet:

1️⃣In 2018, Anna and Debbie launched the Allbright Member’s Club in Mayfair, but were forced to close it down because of the pandemic in 2020. They explain how they overcame the unprecedented adversities and adapted to the ‘new normal’.

2️⃣Raising capital and dealing with investors is difficult for female founders in the best of times, and they tell us how AllBright managed these hurdles during and after the pandemic, and why it’s harder than it sometimes looks.

3️⃣Women need to feel financially confident so they can achieve their goals. Debbie and Annie share why they think having money conversations is integral to making this happen.

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1. moving fast and fixing things

“Let’s be clear on the stats: women don’t raise capital. Pre-pandemic, 2.17% of capital went to back female founders. Post-pandemic, it’s 1%.”

— Debbie Wosskow

• The problem-solving skills that Debbie and Anna acquired throughout their careers certainly came in handy once the pandemic hit. This helped them to quickly move solution brainstorming.

• More than ever, women needed AllBright’s support network, and it was vital that they were able to provide it. The challenge, then, was to take the essence of the company online.

• Debbie and Anna had to cram a digital roadmap of 18 months’ into a couple of weeks, and their core team had to come together and think about how to deliver for their community.

• While they were rebuilding their digital platform, they used the existing social media channels to make sure they really understood what their community wanted from them.

• Debbie emphasises that we are all far more resilient than we think, and despite the adversities, we made it through an extremely challenging time.

2. it’s always about what’s right for the business

• Raising capital can be a nightmare, so be prepared! It’s important for women to know what you want as founders, what capital you need and where it should come from. Don’t see capital as an end in itself.

• When it comes to dealing with investors, it’s like any relationship: it’s all about communication, clarity, and working at it.

• However, communication and clarity can get difficult when you have shift strategies.

• It’s really easy to glamourise fundraising, but the reality is that you pay for it in blood. The investor relationship is a little adversarial because they’ve got their objectives, and you’ve got yours.

• Raising capital is extra hard without a partner, so Debbie is grateful to have a partner she respects, who has a different skillset from hers.

• Everything in life and in business is about relationships, and in very difficult times it’s immensely helpful to have someone pick you up when you’re down.

3. planning for your fundraising journey

• The business you end up with is not necessarily the business you set out to build, because you’re listening to your customers, you’re seeing what happens in the marketplace and what happens with your competitors.

• Test things out, bootstrap it as long as you can, once you show that you have a market / idea that has traction then you can talk about a more ambitious plan.

• You sometimes have to just chunk it down — and prove the model.

RESOURCES: 

You can follow and connect with Debbie and Anna at:

https://www.allbrightcollective.com/

AllBright Instagram

Twitter @weareAllBright, @DebbieWossk and @MrsAnnaKJones

Book by Anna Jones and Debbie Wosskow: Believe. Build. Become: How to Supercharge Your Career

Resources mentioned in the episode:

Pitchbook

The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz

Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance

*** Our podcast partners PensionBee are also offering you a £25 pension contribution (£20, plus £5 in tax relief) when you sign up. To claim the offer, follow this link: https://www.pensionbee.com/vestpod. Capital at risk. ***