I recently came across the female business angel network and
was encouraged and depressed by its existence in equal measure:
while it’s always good to have finance tailored to specific groups
of enterprises (increases the likelihood of engagement, makes it easier to
develop supportive relationships, etc), there’s a very large associated risk
that it stifles the potential of the enterprise being financed;
an entrepreneur engaging with such specific and niche
support is highly unlikely to subsequently engage with the wider business support
community on the strength of the relationship they develop with it, and so won’t
want to look for anything else – ultimately this means that they’ll miss out on
opportunities that may have been open to them elsewhere, in programmes that
have a more ‘mixed’ recruitment to the businesses they’ll support.
Think I’m blowing smoke over nothing? Well, there are two
things I’d point to which have led me to come to this perspective:
1) the rise of Islamic Finance: it’s generally not
a mainstream offer, and since its introduction I’ve anecdotally been aware that
there is a significantly decreasing diversity amongst entrepreneurs in the more
general business support programmes I’ve been involved in supporting...
2) I like to think I keep pretty clued up about
support available to entrepreneurs of all types (it’s what some clients feel
they value the most about me), but as someone who’s been involved with
enterprise financing for 14 years in different guises at local, regional and
national levels, this is the first time I’ve come across the female business
angel network...
So – the female business angel network: along with other
niche enterprise support offers it’s a great resource to engaging those
entrepreneurs who might have otherwise ‘slipped through the net’ on the basis
of sexism or other bias and prejudice (however explicit or implicit) within
wider business support programmes and bodies, but with an increasingly
fragmented marketplace of such support, I’m increasingly concerned about how
well its being ‘joined up’ to ensure that those being supporting to pursue and
realise their dreams and hopes don’t inadvertently find themselves being unnecessarily
stifled or curtailed...