Hi there
It’s been a big milestone week for NOON. On Thursday with much hullaballoo we launched an HSBC report featuring our original research – Fearless and Thriving How Midlife Female Entrepreneurs are Changing the Game – all about Queenager entrepreneurs.
I went on BBC Woman’s Hour to talk about the findings (you can listen here) and we held a very glamorous lunch (thank you, HSBC) at Scott’s in Mayfair. It serves incredible fish and is usually the preserve of billionaires and celebrities, so we felt very special.
I am so grateful to all of you on this newsletter and in the NOON community who took part in our survey. Your voices were crucial in unmasking the desperate lack of a funding ecosystem for female founders as well as highlighting the great work and inspiration taking place. And for me, this topic is very personal.
Why this report is so personal
We set up NOON in March 2021. I was lucky enough to find a brilliant female angel who contributed the seed funds to set up the website, but only 4% of female entrepreneurs get that kind of vote of confidence. We found 69% of female founders fund their business from their own savings, loans or remortgaging – with only 2% getting any Venture Capital investment and only 3% getting a business loan from a bank.
Yet the Rose Review found that if women built and scaled their businesses at the same rate as men it would add £250 BILLION to the UK economy; any government serious about growth should be paying attention.
As well as the lack of funding, our Queenager founders said they needed wider support around business plans, investment, technology, hiring and confidence. But the good news is that so many of us are doing it anyway: Gathering our courage, following our hunches and seeing huge gaps in the market. We’re not fools. The majority of us are starting businesses in industries we have worked in for decades, so we know the ropes. And women age 45+ are behind 75% of all discretionary spending (whether that’s on clothes, tech or luxury travel) so Queenagers who know their audience are at an advantage.
Queenagers = money
When I interviewed Sheryl Sandberg, she told me that older women are the “most lucrative and underserved cohort in the whole of the marketing firmament”. She’s right. Despite controlling more than 60% of all wealth now in the UK, we appear in less than 10% of advertising – even though our NOON research shows that Queenagers would be 68% MORE likely to buy from a brand that represents them authentically.
Meet the women in our report
At the launch we had a host of brilliant entrepreneurs – we profiled them all in the report which you can read in PDF form here.
And if you want to pick up some tips from perhaps the most successful Queenager founder of all – here is a link to my Insta live with Trinny. She funded her £300 million business Trinny London by auctioning all her clothes because she found it so hard to get investment. The men she was asking for it couldn’t get their heads around the idea of a skincare brand for older women. They asked her things like, “Are women online?” Trinny wasn’t the only one: Also at our launch was the amazing Tricia Cusden, founder of Look Fabulous Forever, who also founded an online makeup brand directed at older females that fills a vital niche.
But it’s not just makeup and skincare.
Next to me at the lunch was Kavita Reddi, a former Newsnight Producer who now runs an AI start-up which helped swing the Indian election to Modi. It enabled illiterate voters to ask ‘President Modi’ (a chat bot) their questions, whether about women’s safety or youth unemployment. Modi’s campaign altered their stance and messaging in response to the millions of questions asked by voters who never usually had a voice.
If you’re considering starting a business and would like some inspiration, do have a read through the report!
What’s great about being an entrepreneur
Personally, I love being a Founder. I love the speed with which we can make decisions and act on them. In my old corporate role, it could take months to get a good idea through loads of committees; now we can fail fast (i.e. if it doesn’t work, we stop and don’t do it again). Of course sometimes it is a white-knuckle ride – I am so grateful to all of you who gave money to our Crowdfunder before Christmas. The money we raised has all gone into transferring our operations from a range of platforms (Substack, Eventbrite etc) onto our NOON website and integrating it with membership – a key move to enable us to expand and grow.
Support female entrepreneurship!
Without your help we would never have made it, and I am full of gratitude to all of you who supported that Crowdfunder or who pay us a subscription every month. It costs a lot to administrate the NOON Circles, the website, the events, the retreats and the trips we do. We have a small team but even so, we have bills to pay every month.
There are 20,000 of you on this newsletter – if you’ve been reading and enjoying it regularly, please become a member of NOON. You’ll be supporting the work we do to change the story in the culture about what older women are for, doing vital research and supporting female entrepreneurship!
You’ll also meet likeminded women, have access to our Book Clubs, webinars, Circles and loads more – all while being part of the Queenager Revolution. I don’t pay myself anything for all the work I put into NOON (I fund my life through journalism and speeches). But we want NOON to continue to thrive and grow and become a profitable powerhouse worthy of all you amazing women!
Becoming a monthly or annual member you not only get the most out of NOON but also support us financially. There – that is my Founders plea. 😍 (And a link to join….)
Have a lovely weekend and do come and join us at the Online Circle on Monday night; in Folkestone on Thursday (FREE and open to non-members as well as members); or on our jolly excursion for art and seaside fun in Margate on June 7th; the tickets have just gone live.
Much love,
Eleanor
