Anna Jones, the former CEO of Hearst and co-founder of AllBright - a network that supports women at all stages of their careers - talks to us about the women who inspire her.
“I think striving for equality and opportunity at work isn’t just a political ideal. It makes commercial sense. Mixed-gender teams produce better returns.
“However, the worst data out there is for female entrepreneurs. One in 10 wants to start their own business but they aren’t doing so. Did you know that you’re 86% more likely to be funded by venture capital if you’re a male entrepreneur? You’re also 56% more likely to secure angel investment.
“The whole premise of AllBright is all about the incredible things that happen when women come together. Initially, it started with events, at a festival for women in business called FoundHER which helped us see that women wanted to come together on a regular basis. This helped us launch the members’ club.”
“Debbie Wosskow (OBE, founder of Love Home Swap) and I were introduced by a mutual friend who thought we would have a lot in common. We bonded over our lives, work and ambitions in how we saw the world. We both believe in empowering women because we’re both outliers in the sense that I was the CEO at Hearst and even though the business had been in existence for over 100 years, they had never had a female CEO.
“Debbie is a serial entrepreneur and at the time had a very successful tech business and it’s unusual to be a successful female founder in the tech space. It shouldn’t be unusual to be a woman in these roles but it is, and that galvanized us around what we could do to develop a community to help change the landscape for women in the UK.
“I knew all of these awesome, ambitious women who wanted to do something amazing with their careers, but they didn’t know how.
“So we started thinking about what it would look like to build that community of women, to help them inspire and connect with each other.
“Fun fact: the name AllBright was initially a sort of code name inspired by former US Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, who asserted that “there’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other.” I love the sentiment of being “all bright:” everything we do is celebratory.
“We are trying to make women consciously focus on their network, expanding beyond friends and colleagues. We did a piece of research earlier this year that proves that women who consciously develop a work sisterhood are more likely to have a more successful career and be higher up the food chain.
“Women workshop things together. They talk about family, kids, relationships, fashion problems, but they’re less focused on talking about how you get that promotion or negotiate new terms for your role. We’re working on making that more normalised.
“AllBright is comprised of three parts. There’s a members’ club in Fitzrovia (one is being built in Mayfair, another is opening in Los Angeles). There’s the Academy, which we launched after feedback from our community that people wanted to learn how to start a business or take their career to the next level, but didn’t necessarily have the time to do so. We wanted to do something flexible because we know women are busy; we also wanted something which is very pragmatically focused, not just academic.
“We’ve created a free 10-week programme open to women across the UK, with two courses: one on how to start and scale your own business, the other on how to smash the glass ceiling (geared towards ambitious women in all stages of their careers).
“Each week focuses on a specific topic like goal setting, negotiation skills, digital marketing, and we go into quite a lot of depth. It only takes two to four hours so it’s a manageable amount of time that a woman can spare in her busy week. We’ve got executives and well-known entrepreneurs like Cath Kidston on board and we have just started the first cohort with thousands of women. The intention is to start a new one every couple of months - the feedback so far has been fantastic.
“Another thing we do is connect our members to more sources of capital. We run a monthly pitch event where we have six to 10 businesses pitching to VCs and high-net worth individuals. We help founders navigate this process and we help them get their pitches honed. This is something we feel very strongly about: from a financial point of view, women don’t tend to invest and there aren’t very many female partners in investment. It’s something we try to encourage more people to think about. There’s been a bit of a gear shift in this outdated idea that to be a successful, senior female leader you need to be some kind of a mega b****. That’s not what I’ve encountered.
“Virginia Woolf was someone we thought about when opening our club doors in Bloomsbury. She and her group of amazing, talented women were doing their thing in this area. We liked the idea that they gathered here, putting the world to rights. Woolf is now seen as somebody who was an early feminist voice, a mould-breaker, a trailblazer, and that’s how we like to think of ourselves and what we’re doing. We curtailed her quote and believe that it stands today: “A woman must have money and a room of her own.”
“We have found that some clichés about how women run businesses are playing out to be true. Women are quite realistic and pessimistic when talking about business and ideas. There are cultural norms around how women pitch - and how they’re perceived by the investment community. For example, women often start a business to balance family and work and to be their own bosses. We feel those businesses are very valid. There’s also a lot written about how women talk about themselves and how they’re conditioned by society to not big themselves up.
“We want to help women talk about their dreams and ambitions in a more overt way and that’s part of the mission of what we’re doing with the Academy. It’s really important that women can also learn from each other as well as from these inspiring women they look up to. They can workshop things with women going through similar challenges and opportunities.
“From a personal point of view, I never really thought about the women who influenced me until I started AllBright. I’m the eldest of four girls and my mother is Danish - culturally there isn’t an assumption there that women will stay at home. Living in rural Yorkshire, there was nothing I thought I couldn’t do. I didn’t think being a woman would be a disadvantage.
“I moved to London after my degree and set up a work sisterhood which has continued to be my group. I went on to work with some incredible women in the media industry who have influenced me: Lorraine Candy, Farrah Storr, Justine Picardie, as well as CEOs and entrepreneurs and authors who I can pick up the phone to and who have been a voice to a lot of women. My co-founder Debbie is an absolute force of nature. I learn things from her every day.
“Some of our members are also incredibly inspirational, like Martha Lane Fox and Naomie Harris. They’re very down to earth when they’re here, very supportive, and they help us grow our community and network. I am surrounded by a lot of very strong women - my weekly management team meeting is full of awesome women in their own right. People here really lean into the mission and lead by example.
“The biggest change in my work life has been co-founding a business. I went from a corner office at a very big company - quite often when you work in a big business you don’t see or talk to the customer every day. But we do. We’re in a lucky position that we get feedback every day from members, academy graduates, people who have pitched and got back… it’s really exciting.
“People are cooking up ideas here: someone came up to me with a beauty business and she’d managed to get early investment from someone else at AllBright - she hadn’t even done the monthly pitch!
“We can see this community is growing and thriving and gaining something from what we’re trying to do. It’s been fabulous to see that our members are building their networks, getting book deals signed, getting funded and finding new roles and opportunities through people they’re meeting in the club.
“I wander around and people come up to me and say: joining this club has changed my life. It’s given me the confidence to quit my job, to ask for that pay rise. It makes me feel really proud.”