What does it take to go from selling polished conkers to schoolmates at age five to becoming an MBE-honoured champion for female entrepreneurs?
Alison Cork MBE knows the journey intimately, having never worked for anyone else throughout her remarkable 40-year entrepreneurial career.
Alison shares how her natural problem-solving instinct led her to start multiple successful businesses, including a publishing venture that floated on the London Stock Exchange in 1994, making her the youngest female founder of a publicly quoted company at the time. Yet even with this achievement, she found herself ignored at boardroom tables filled with men – despite having discovered the product that made the company profitable enough to go public.
This isolation became the catalyst for creating Make It Your Business and National Women’s Enterprise Week, initiatives designed to give female entrepreneurs the connections, confidence, and capital they need to succeed. Alison’s research revealing a 31% funding gap between male and female entrepreneurs underscores why these support networks matter. Her solution? Developing stronger angel investor communities where women can access the initial funding needed to launch their dreams.
What resonates most powerfully is Alison’s passionate defence of what she calls “acorn businesses” – small ventures that might generate modest incomes but provide life-changing freedom and financial independence. “That amount of money could be the difference between walking out the door from a situation that is unacceptable or having to stay because you don’t have means to leave,” she explains, highlighting entrepreneurship’s transformative potential beyond profit metrics alone.
For women hesitating to take that first step, her advice is refreshingly straightforward: connect with local entrepreneurial communities, share authentic stories (including failures), and adopt her personal mantra – “unless there is an utterly compelling reason to say no, I will say yes.” Ready to join the movement? Visit nwew.co.uk to learn about the accelerator program helping women pitch with confidence and secure investment for their ventures.
