If entrepreneurs are trying to bring solutions to meet current societal problems, how do we support them? Alongside Allia’s remarkable venture support team, I explored this question in two contexts for my leadership-in-action project. First, through creating a research framework to help reach and support underrepresented founders. Second, through a broader scope of working directly with founders to scale and expand their enterprises. This project not only allowed me to become immersed within the venture landscape, meeting and learning from entrepreneurs to investors, but also it was a valuable opportunity to actively develop my personal skillset in light of an unfamiliar and complex field.
This first calls for a little explanation of what Venture Support is and what impact organisations like Allia strive to make within the venture space. Enterprises grow from a small start-up with initially little funding to receiving investment and scaling up and then finally, gaining enough investment to enter into the public market. Whilst Venture Support organisations are generally useful at any stage of this lifecycle, they facilitate most support at the initial stage of growth - teaching founders where to get funding, how to pitch their company to investors, how to scale up etc. In essence, supporting companies to grow within the venture space. Similarly, the Venture Support Team at Allia strives to provide support to companies of different sizes, but specifically to ventures that create positive impact to ‘People, Planet, Place’. Considering this context, my leadership-in-action project took place through working alongside this team to develop a framework that the VS Team could implement to reach and support underrepresented founders.
Set at the beginning of the project, my goal was to implement a workable framework which would help Allia directly tackle the issue of underrepresentation within the entrepreneurial ecosystem. Yet, as I began to further research this area, I quickly realised the intersectionality of wider societal issues such as unconscious bias, gender roles and mental health as pervading problems within the venture industry with disproportionate effect upon female founders and ethnic minorities. Further, I quickly found out that the scope of who was underrepresented within the venture industry was far vaster than I had initially envisioned, with rural communities, those who are neurodivergent or have a disability, LGBTQ+ founders only making up a fraction of the category. Thus, the biggest challenge I faced was creating something that was actionable in light of the topic’s vastness and its complex relationship with entrenched societal issues.
To overcome this challenge, I had to set parameters in my project by focussing specifically on female founders, ethnic minorities and immigrant population in the unique issues that they face as well as overarching themes that can be drawn from the problems that all groups faced. Thus, through research from conducting interviews with different groups, surveying Allia alumni, and combing through academic literature and research done by various other organisations, I was able to produce the following list of contextualised recommendations that addressed some of the issues underrepresented founders face:
- Increasing access to Allia programmes through working with local community organisations such as community centres
- Creating tailored programmes for ethnic minority businesses, immigrant, female founders (or intersectional groups)
- Increasing education about accessing external finance sources and debunking myths in this area.
- Introducing workshops focussed on building confidence and mind-set training.
- Supporting founders’ mental health through pledges, resources, modules and referring external sources of support
- Addressing and supporting caring responsibilities
- Using structured frameworks to combat unconscious bias at every level from peer-to-peer workshops to investors at Demo Days
- Creating more diverse networking opportunities.
I gained from this project not only a heightened level of respect for the underrepresented founders who must continually surmount the barriers placed in front of them by the venture industry and wider society, but also a better understanding of how entrepreneurs often use personal experience and reflections to introduce a new enterprise focussed on solving a problem that they have identified through such experiences. Learning more about different industries through the viewpoint of entrepreneurs was a valuable insight into not just technical market trends but also in identifying where new opportunities for growth lie. Further, a particular high of this project for me was identifying the gaps in support for particular stakeholders and using these learnings to create tailored recommendations in directing resources towards them.
The impact of this project I hope that is that such report was able to facilitate Allia and like organisations’ access to underrepresented founders and provide them with the necessary steps in supporting their entrepreneurial journey. To sustain this impact, it would be beneficial if these findings could be shared to other organisations so that more resources are pooled to tackling the identified issues and further and more sophisticated solutions can be adopted. As mentioned, these issues are hugely intersectional with larger social problems, and this means that one organisation cannot tackle it themselves. Personally, I found that this project helped me develop my networking and communication skills as well as more technical ability in research analysis. This Leadership-in-Action Project has been a truly fulfilling experience in which I was able to create impact through my work and develop my leadership skills alongside.