Men dominate The Times list of the richest 250 people in Britain, with more women marrying into the list than earning a place on it in their own right. Sabah Meddings asks where the next generation of female billionaires will come from.
For Romi Savova, it was leaving a job in investment banking that provided her with a multimillion-pound idea. The more people she spoke to, the more she realised that almost everyone had a "left behind" pension from a former job. "Something had to be done about this problem," says Savova, 35.
Seven years on, her company PensionBee has 137,000 active customers and controls £1.7 billion ($3.2 billion) of assets from clients' transferred old pensions that have been invested into new online plans. Its flotation last month on the London Stock Exchange made Savova a paper fortune of about £132 million ($256 million) from her share of the business. It is not yet enough to join the Rich List 250, but it puts her several rungs up the ladder towards it.
Savova's story is rare, however. There are very few self-made women in the Rich List 250. Of the 53 women who do appear, 19 feature as half of a married couple and 27 inherited at least some of their wealth or used family money to launch their own businesses.
The drinks heiress Charlene de Carvalho-Heineken, worth £12.013 billion ($23.29 billion), inherited her father Freddy's share of the Dutch brewing giant. Even Denise Coates, who has a net worth of £8.448 billion ($16.386 billion) and who leads the online gambling company Bet365, had to mortgage her father's chain of betting shops to raise the cash to expand her website. Both women run huge businesses that have thrived under their stewardship, but in each instance they had something to build upon.
There are only ten women in the Rich List 250 who have made the bulk of the money ascribed to them in their valuations.
"The situation is actually pretty dire," says Savova, who lives in London with her Spanish husband and two children. "There's a lot of talk about wanting to fix things, but that talk needs to translate into real figures."
Part of the problem, Savova says, is access to start-up funding. She was able to tap into her network of finance professionals from her banking days at Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs to hunt for angel investors, but says her circumstances were "unique".
This scepticism is borne out in the numbers. In Europe, just 2 per cent of funding from venture capital firms goes to female-founded companies, while 5 per cent goes to companies with a mixed team, according to a report from the investment bank UBS.
"Single female-founded businesses struggle the most with raising capital," Savova says. "A lot of the reason why women aren't getting funded is because there are a lot of men distributing funding. As a result of that, unconscious bias creeps in when investment decisions are being made."
In February, the American entrepreneur Whitney Wolfe Herd became the world's youngest self-made female billionaire at the age of 31 when she took Bumble, her dating app, public. Her 12 per cent stake in the company puts her net worth at US$1.3 billion ($1.78 billion), according to Forbes.
While the UK hasn't produced a similar female success story in one so young (the rise of the 33-year-old pop star Adele, worth £130 million, comes closest), there are several women in business outside our 250 richest who might one day break into the billionaire boys club.
Debbie Bestwick is the founder and chief executive of Team17, a video game developer and publisher. The gaming industry, which has provided an affordable form of entertainment for families stuck at home, has been one of the winners of lockdown. Bestwick, 51, was a new entry to the Rich List last year, with a net worth of £196 million ($380 million).
The mother of two began working at a video games shop in Nottingham when she was 16 and her mother needed help paying the rent. Team17 was founded in 1990 and has been at the forefront of a gaming revolution, with its bestseller, Worms, becoming a cult classic. The company was floated in 2018, when it was worth £200 million ($387 million). Three years after going public, Team17 is now valued at about £900 million ($1.74 billion), with Bestwick's share worth £200 million.
The global games industry is expected to be worth an estimated US$200 billion by 2023, with 50 per cent of the market comprising games played on mobile phones. "It's the largest form of entertainment that we have," says Katie Cousins, an analyst at the stockbroker Shore Capital, who puts Bestwick's success down to her genuine interest in what she sells. "At Team17 they generally make games that they enjoy playing, and [Debbie] does play games, which is really important."
Bestwick had an unconventional journey to business success, and the same applies to Kelly Choi. The 52-year-old owns KellyDeli with her husband, Jérôme Castaing, and the couple are jointly worth £413 million ($800 million) this year, thanks to their Sushi Daily franchises in travel hubs and supermarkets, including Waitrose. She founded the business after the collapse of her first venture during the 2008 financial crisis.
Adversity was nothing new, though. Choi was one of six children in a South Korean farming family. Money was scarce, as was food. Two of her brothers died from malnutrition as children. Denied a secondary education — it was not for girls, said her father — she moved to Seoul at the age of 15 to work in a garment factory. This allowed her to pay for evening classes. Choi later travelled to Tokyo to study. She found work in the fashion industry — and developed a taste for raw fish.
Next stop was Paris, where she worked for the Galeries Lafayette chain before establishing a communications business. When this collapsed in 2008 with debts of €1 million, Choi hit rock bottom and walking by the Seine one day, she thought: "Perhaps it would be easier just to die," she told The Sunday Times. Instead, she steeled herself to start afresh and began building the empire that became Sushi Daily.
Penny Streeter found herself living in a refuge with three young children after both her business and marriage collapsed. The founder and chief executive of the medical recruitment company A24 Group was born in Zimbabwe and moved to the UK at the age of 15 with her mother. Streeter, 53, remembers how the bank managers she approached to borrow money to fund her first business referred to her as a "girl" instead of a woman. She has avoided borrowing ever since. "That really put me off," she says. "The biggest thing that still worries women is failure, and about being put down."
Streeter, who was worth £201 million ($389 million) last year, recognises the difficulties faced by the few women who are in senior business roles. "Often there's nobody to talk to who's in the same position as you," she says. "You become pretty adept at making very quick decisions."
For this reason female-led businesses can be appealing to some investors. "A lot of male-led businesses often got caught up in the spreadsheets or the exuberance of what they could become, whereas a female founder often says, 'I have to earn the right to ask for money'," says Seb Dovey, who co-founded the wealth manager Scorpio Partnership and sits on the board of Angel Academe, which focuses on female founders and investors. This view is backed up by the numbers. Women-led start-ups generate 78 cents of revenue per dollar invested compared with 31 cents for men, according to a 2018 report by Boston Consulting Group.
For the White Company's Chrissie Rucker, who first appeared on the list in 2007, the goal has always been for "strong and safe growth". Rucker, 52, established the retailer 27 years ago with £6,000 ($11,000) of inheritance from her grandmother. Today she is one half of a retail power couple — her husband, Nick Wheeler, runs the menswear chain Charles Tyrwhitt. "With no outside investors, we have had to operate within the boundaries of our own cash flow and lending from the bank," she says. "So every penny has had to be spent carefully."
The success of the likes of Bestwick, Choi, Streeter and Rucker offers hope for more women at the top of future Rich Lists. A report by Beauhurst, which compiles data on high-growth companies, offers grounds for optimism. The average age of companies founded by women is four years younger than those founded by men — suggesting an increase in the pipeline of female entrepreneurs not yet fully captured by the Rich List.
"Entrepreneurship has become much more fashionable," says Sarah Turner, chief executive and co-founder of Angel Academe. "MBAs, which used to turn out consultants and bankers, are very much geared towards entrepreneurship. The word is out."
Eva Lindholm, head of UBS Wealth Management for the UK and Jersey, says women today are creating wealth at an "unprecedented rate". "They're doing that through their own employment, as women get better represented in the workforce … and women are also starting businesses at admirable rates," she explains. "Women's wealth driven by this entrepreneurial component is set to double every decade for the next couple of decades."
However, there is a common factor with many of these successful female entrepreneurs: a supportive partner. "What I hear from quite a lot of women who managed to make it work is that they married well," Lindholm says, "and by well, I mean they've married or partnered with somebody who is supportive of their careers, and is inclined to share in the family's responsibilities."
For Savova, the key to success is perseverance. "There are times when it will feel really, really hard and tough," she says. "But, you know, if it was really easy, someone else would already be doing it."
A sentiment that would be endorsed by the person most likely to be Britain's next self-made female billionaire: author Joanne Rowling. With a fortune of £820 million ($1.5 billion) and rising, Rowling had Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone rejected by 12 publishers before Bloomsbury accepted it, opening the door for her boy wizard to conjure up a literary fortune.
Self-made women
Female Rich Listers who made the bulk of their wealth:
1 Charlene de Carvalho-Heineken £12.013bn
2 Denise Coates £8.448bn
3 Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw £2.942bn
4 Varsha Engineer £1.7bn
5= Elisabeth Murdoch £1.2bn
5= Dame Mary Perkins £1.2bn
7 Christina Ong £1bn
8 Joanne Rowling £820m
9 Ruth Parasol £780m
10 Dame Ann Gloag £650m
Written by: Sabah Meddings
© The Times of London
