Are these the top 35 business women in Britain today?

06/07/2015
This year's 35 Women Under 35 list highlights the importance of female entrepreneurs, says the report's authors
More work is needed to boost the pipeline of talent coming to the top levels of business, says a new report.

Despite recent strides in the boardroom, there is still a long way to go to improve women's overall business prospects, says a survey by business publication Management Today.
Its 35 Women Under 35 list highlights women aged 35 and under "who are bucking trends and should be celebrated" in broader parts of industry. Previous people on the list, which is published annually and is now in its 15th year, have included Martha Lane Fox, Elisabeth Murdoch and Stella McCartney.
The publication said almost a third of women on the list were born outside the UK, highlighting the importance that migrants make to the UK economy.
It added that 29pc of the list are entrepreneurs, suggesting big firms that don't embrace diversity will miss out on some of the most promising leaders of tomorrow, who are unafraid of doing their own thing instead.
"Our list illustrates the vital importance of migrants to the UK economy," said Matthew Gwyther, editor of Management Today. "The energy and determination of these young women demonstrate perfectly that rather than being a burden on the state, many migrants contribute a huge amount to society and British business."
The number of women on boards has doubled in the past few years and almost a quarter of FTSE 100 board positions are now being filled by women, according to the latest annual report from Lord Mervyn Davies, the government's champion of gender equality at Britain's biggest companies.
The list
Irene Arango, 33
Co-founder of London raw food restaurant NAMA Foods, the Spaniard is spearheading a food revolution. Chef Arango opened her restaurant in 2012 in Queen’s Park with business partner Rich Havardi, then relocated to Notting Hill. Turnover tops £1m, with 21 employees, and there are plans for a production facility, a UK-wide delivery service and a retail range.
Georgie Bell, 27
It was while working in bars as a student at Edinburgh University that Bell fell in love with whisky. Keen to make a career out of it, she did a diploma at the Institute of Brewing and Distilling, winning the Worshipful Company of Distillers Scholarship Award for the highest mark globally, before joining The Scotch Malt Whisky Society. Diageo then came knocking, appointing Bell as brand ambassador for upmarket single malt Mortlach at the beginning of last year. A rare female in the luxury spirits sector, she’s tasked with launching and promoting the ‘Beast of Dufftown’ around the world.
Becky Brock, 35
Snow+Rock Group’s marketing director has a strong pedigree, having broken marketing ground at distiller Edrington Group, where she was the business’s only female senior manager. At Homebase, she won the Marketing Society’s Young Marketer of the Year, 2011, for her work on the brand’s TV ad featuring the instant makeover of Carlisle railway station.
Suzanna Broer, 33
M&S’s global director of insights and loyalty started her career at McKinsey before moving to Danone, where by 28, she had become a global strategy director. She then joined retailer Ahold to run its customer business insights department, and in 2012 was poached by the Netherlands’ largest retailer Albert Heijn to create its loyalty department.
Carla Buzasi, 35
As global chief content officer at WGSN, an international consumer, fashion and design foresights business, Buzasi manages a team of 75, all expert at predicting what the next big trends will be. Previously at Huffington Post UK, where she was founding editor and then editor-in-chief, she won many awards and helped make the brand a household name.
Natalie Campbell, 31
Campbell is the co-founder of A Very Good Company, a social innovation agency that helps employees become better engaged in sustainability initiatives. Clients include Virgin Media, M&S and Channel 4. Campbell is a director of ‘Kensington Creates’, a business incubator at a west London school, and is a trustee of UnLtd and on the board of the Big Lottery Fund.
Sarah Chapman, 30
As co-founder and CEO of Iwana Energy, Chapman helps develop solar energy projects across Latin America by linking international investors with local entrepreneurs, and has built a pipeline of 40MW of solar projects in Guatemala, Honduras, Panama and El Salvador. She was formerly chief of staff at the Global Commission on the Economy and Climate.
Nicola Combe, 29
A product manager for British Gas Connected Homes, Combe leads the design and development team for Hive Active Heating, a ‘smart thermostat’, which she helped launch in 2013, and which now has 150,000 paying customers. Hive gained the RNIB’s first ‘App Accreditation’ for accessibility. In 2014, she was shortlisted for the IET Young Woman Engineer Awards.
Bijna Dasani, 30
This Deutsche Bank VP has a global remit that spans three continents, and recently had sole responsibility for a multi-billion euro cost reduction programme. Dasani has worked for both Credit Suisse and Goldman Sachs. She also co-founded the Beauty and Wellness Academy at City Gateway, which provides training for disadvantaged women.
Alex Depledge, 34
Launching Hassle.com, an online marketplace for local cleaners in 2013, co-founder and CEO Depledge helped the business raise $6m in investment funding from Accel Partners. The start-up operates in cities in four countries, and is committed to improving the fortunes of the cleaners it has on its books. She won Tech City’s Entrepreneur of the Year, 2014.
Gemma Godfrey, 31
Head of investment strategy at Brooks Macdonald, the publicly listed wealth manager, Godfrey runs $10bn of assets for 11 offices and oversees 460 employees. She trebled managed assets in only three years. The former quantum physicist also advises the boards of Templars Communications Consultancy, GrowthPoint Structures and JC Investments.
Joséphine Goube, 26
She might have been brought up in the small village of Hardelot in northern France but Goube has big ambitions. She is the director of partnerships at web portal Migreat, which helps migrants move and settle in Europe, and a fierce lobbyist for smarter immigration policies. She has been selected to lead the EU’s immigration experts group to advise on the reform of visa rules for foreign entrepreneurs in Europe. Goube is also co-managing director of Girls in Tech, a UK non-profit organisation raising the visibility of women in tech, innovation and entrepreneurship.
Irina Haivas, 34
As principal/investment executive for GHO Capital, Romanian-born Haivas is one of the few senior women working in private equity in London, managing investments in healthcare companies worth £100m- £400m. The Harvard-trained surgeon did an international health policy master’s degree at the LSE, and at Bain & Company launched its healthcare practice.
Verity Harding, 30
Harding has made the jump from the public to private sector, joining Google UK in 2013 as public policy manager after a stint as Nick Clegg’s special adviser. The Oxford and Harvard grad leads the search giant’s European campaign to counter extremism online with positivity rather than censorship. She sits on the advisory board of Women on Boards UK.
Dr Nasrin Hafezparast, 32
Dual-trained in both computer science and medicine, Hafezparast is a fully qualified medical doctor and a tech entrepreneur. She’s the co-founder of Which Web Design Company (think TripAdvisor for web designers) and Outcomes Based Healthcare, a London-based medtech start-up, which uses big data to predict and pre-treat health conditions. Launched two years ago, Outcomes Based Healthcare now employs 15 people, has a turnover of £600,000 and recently won a £1m match-funded grant from Innovate UK.
Lisa Humphreys, 34
A board director at Mediacom, Humphreys is the youngest and only female member of its five-strong elite trading division. She is jointly responsible for more than £970m of brand media investment. Having previously led a team of 32 media buyers, she now manages the £75m Out Of Home business and the delivery of two contracts, worth an estimated £81m this year.
Anne-Marie Imafidon, 26
A child prodigy, Imafidon passed GCSEs in maths and ICT aged just 10 and broke the world record for the youngest girl to pass A-level computing when she was 11. The former Deutsche Bank-er founded Stemettes two years ago to get more girls into science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) careers, and has won a host of business and technology awards.
Anushika Indraratna, 34
Indraratna manages sales of precious metals in the western hemisphere for FTSE 100 mega-miner Anglo American. Before joining in 2012, she worked for rival Rio Tinto for six years. There, she was seconded to Montreal at the age of 27 to help identify $100m in cost savings from acquisition Alcan, and then advised the unit’s CEO on the company’s global strategy.
Jemma Jones, 30
Jones is Honda’s largest budget holder in Europe and is responsible for a multi-platform marketing spend of millions, including that award-winning TV ad where a pair of hands turns a nut into everything from a motorbike to a robot. Reporting to European senior management and to the corporate HQ in Japan, Jones juggles a multiplicity of stakeholders.
Emma Kendrew, 34
With a 10-year track record of big-ticket corporate projects, Kendrew is now strategy lead for Accenture’s new global Fuels Retail Practice. She provides high-tech cloud and mobile solutions to help the fuel retail industry cope with the turbulent oil price and rising competition. Kendrew is also a role model for Accenture’s female graduates.
Annabel Kilner, 34
Kilner launched her career as marketing manager at innovation consultancy FreshMinds and set up the company’s retail division, which quickly became its biggest sector. Along the way she met Brent Hoberman of Lastminute.com fame and, under his mentorship, realised that e-commerce was her future. They worked together at Mydeco.com and now Made.com – the online designer furniture brand. As country manager UK, Kilner has helped boost turnover from £26.2m in 2013 to £42.7m last year and seen the company named the second fastest-growing tech business in the country.
Jessica Kruger, 27
Kruger’s frustration at the lack of imaginative vegetarian food on offer pushed her to launch stylish, self-service, no-meat restaurant Ethos. Now Australian-born Kruger serves everything from lime and lemongrass smoothies to farfalle a la crème to London’s hungry workers. With projected revenues of more than £1m for her first year’s trading, she’s cooking up a storm.
Caroline Macfarland, 29
Social entrepreneur Macfarland set up CoVi – described as ‘a think tank for the TED generation’ – last year, to encourage political engagement among disillusioned ‘digital first’ twentysomethings. A veteran of Big Society progenitor ResPublica, her aim is to reinvigorate the concept of the ‘Common Good’. Clients include KPMG, among others.
Rachel Montague-Ebbs, 33
Since she joined the Kent-based soft-fruit supplier six years ago, turnover at CPM Retail has blossomed from £6m to a juicy £41m, thanks in no small part to Montague-Ebbs’ efforts in building up an international supplier base providing berries of all shapes and sizes to the UK supermarket sector. She also has her own fashion brand, LadyM Presents.
Catherine O’Kelly, 31
As chief of staff, O’Kelly advises the CEO of British Gas parent Centrica. In place since 2012, she’s seen the handover from Sam Laidlaw to current boss Ian Conn and has overseen 10 large M&A transactions, two of them worth more than $1bn. O’Kelly is also an ambassador for Womankind, a charity focused on improving the plight of women in developing countries.
Temi Marcella Olatunde, 28
After bagging a first-class master’s in economics from Cambridge University, Nigerian-born Olatunde joined Goldman Sachs as an analyst and helped to establish the firm’s ‘10,000 Women’ and ‘10,000 Small Businesses’ initiatives, supporting business owners and female entrepreneurs in the UK. Now an investor at private equity outfit Abraaj Group, she’s worked on deals ranging from the $300m privatisation of a commercial bank in Sub-Saharan Africa to a $200m take-private of a bank in South Asia. She’s also a founding board member of the Olusegun Obasanjo Foundation and the Africa Investment Council, aimed at attracting investment into Africa.
Joana Rego, 32
Fluent in five languages, Rego is associate partner at business intelligence specialist GPW and helps clients around the world by identifying threats to big-ticket deals and how to mitigate them. Rego has brought in £500k in new business in the past year, despite spending six months of it on maternity leave. She also mentors underprivileged teenagers.
Jane Reoch, 35
Reoch has a senior role at not one but two private equity houses – as investment director for the £35m Panoramic Growth Equity Fund and Cass Business School’s £10m Entrepreneurship Fund. She sits on the board of seven highly decorated companies, including the online ad pioneer Captify, and gives her time as a business mentor for the Prince’s Trust.
Kirsty Ross, 31
As membership services director, for the AA, Ross juggles a plethora of roles – she oversees everything from the company’s restaurant inspections to the production of 50,000 road signs per year. One of just six directors reporting directly to the company’s CEO and chairman, Ross is responsible for 250 staff and devises new roads of growth for the AA to navigate.
Toni Skinner, 30
A former restaurant manager, Skinner co-founded craft ale distributor Pig’s Ears Beer four years ago. Turnover broke £1m last year, and customers love it. Now found more in the office than dragging pallets of beer around, Skinner’s taken the business from the storage space in a pub to an 8,000 sq ft warehouse that’s already reaching full capacity.
Alexandra Smyth, 33
When Smyth was a senior associate at a city law firm, she regularly acted for publishers RELX Group (formerly Reed Elsevier), but they liked her so much they hired her for themselves. As general counsel, corporate and M&A, for this FTSE 100 giant, she supervises around 100 lawyers and often instructs her old bosses. She co-wrote a legal tome while working – in one month
Sally Southwell, 32
The first in her family to go to university, Southwell read law at Oxford before joining Linklaters as a competition lawyer. As managing associate, she has seen through the Anglo American/Lafarge joint venture – the largest case ever considered by the Competition Commission (now the CMA). Last year, she worked on UK deals with a total value of more than £1bn.
Joanne Sui, 29
Civil engineer Sui has worked on Crossrail and HS2 while at London Bridge Associates, and sits on the British Tunnelling Society management committee. The former UCL water polo player is currently on secondment to the £4.2bn Thames Tideway Tunnel project, where she’s the youngest employee and only woman in the construction logistics team.
Tess Sundelin, 32
As if running a £10m start-up wasn’t enough, Swede Sundelin also gets to save the planet. After starting her career at Goldman Sachs, she joined renewable energy firm Green Hedge Group in 2011. The business that she co-owns and manages has developed projects that power the equivalent of 37,000 homes, saving 50,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions a year.
Dr Laura Toogood, 30
As managing director of private clients at Digitalis Reputation, Toogood’s work in the growing field of cyber security ranges from protecting the victims of revenge porn to safeguarding FTSE 100 companies from hackers. Her forensic skills have helped heads of state and celebrities. She’s also a published author and editor of luxury magazine The Sloaney.
Ones to watch
Kelly-Anne Byres, 27
Serial entrepreneur Byres started her first business, KBL Accounts, at 24 and now has more than 200 clients on her books. Two years later, she co-founded Poppy Nursing and Care Services, providing nurses and care assistants to hospital trusts and care homes. Less than a year old, the business has branches in Ipswich and Nottingham (and a third planned for Southampton), 80 staff and a £600,000 turnover.
Dr Vivian Chan, 30
After struggling to stay on top of scientific developments during her PhD at Cambridge University, Dr Chan taught herself how to code and in 2013 started Sparrho, a personalised recommendation tool for scientific content. Sparrho has raised more than £500,000 from angel investors – including Huddle’s co-founder Alastair Mitchell – and now has more than 3 million documents in its database.
Levi Young, 28, and Dana Zingher, 27
Ex-journalist Young and former CapGemini IT consultant Zingher are the duo behind Enclothed, a fashion delivery service for men who hate to shop. The pair appeared on Dragons’ Den earlier this year and were offered funding from Kelly Hoppen and Piers Linney. After failing to agree terms, they turned to crowdfunding, raising £1m in six days. Enclothed has 6,000 customers and is set to turn over £1.2m this year.
- Biographies by Kate Bassett at Management Today

Fonte:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/enterprise/11717358/Are-these-the-top-35-business-women-in-Britain-today.html

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