I took my friend and fellow female business owner, Boom Chikka Boom’s Faye Kenny, to the Leeds International Festival for Grace Beverley’s session – How to break moulds and influence people – at The Playhouse. I’ll admit, I went in with a bit of skepticism and preconceived notions.
The reason I was interested? Grace was one of the first people I followed on Instagram who I didn’t actually know —arguably one of my earliest influencer follows. Back then, she had a modest following and was a student at Oxford University. She started out by sharing workout routines and meals to keep fit, eventually selling PDF meal plans and workout guides. I even bought her resistance bands! Honestly though, I was mostly there for her well-spoken English accent and a peek into the life of an Oxford student—something completely foreign to me.
Fast forward 3 or 4 years (I took a little social media sabbatical) and when I returned, Grace had launched Tala, the sustainable activewear brand, and her follower count had skyrocketed. Naturally, I kept tabs on her. I read her best-selling book Working Hard, Hardly Working, packed with her “genius” productivity tips, then followed up with her productivity method planner. And yet, with all these tools in hand, I still managed to show up to my MRI scan last week—one month late.
Grace’s voice commanded a room full of women, many of them business owners asking questions. We were hooked. This is a woman who’s made it to the Forbes 30 Under 30, amassed a million followers and built hugely successful businesses. And while she may seem light-years away from my reality, I couldn’t help but relate to her on a basic level—just being a woman striving for more for ourselves, and for other women.
The statistics Grace shared were shocking, to say the least, and really opened my eyes.
Female founders receive just 2% of venture capital funding in the UK across all industries.
£250 billion could be added to the UK economy if women started and scaled businesses at the same rate as men.
When female-led startups do get funded, they’re more likely to succeed, delivering more than twice as much per dollar invested.
That 98% funding gap is an outrage, and don’t even get me started on the 0.02% figure for Black women.
Up until March this year, a new piece of legislation on angel investing would have, in some areas of the UK, left zero women able to invest. The change was so poorly thought out, it would’ve had disastrous effects on the gender wealth gap. Enter Grace. Using her million-strong following, she launched the InvestHer campaign with an open letter, successfully stopping this nonsense in its tracks. She even had an invite to Number 10 but made it clear this wasn’t a victory—it was merely preventing things from getting worse. Her point? The government needs to step up. We’ve got a long road ahead before things truly improve for women, especially in business.
By the end of Grace’s session, my friend Faye and I were pumped full of girl power and ready for war.
I’ve always admired Grace, but I walked out of that talk even more of a fan—and feeling pretty humbled by my earlier assumptions about her.
Photography by Tom Martin.
