Social conditioning from a young age keeps girls neat and contained. We should be humble and ‘lady-like’, we need to play nicely and create harmony. Do what’s expected with no big surprises.

No one likes a woman who’s too full of herself, right?

So what happens when a woman enters the world of business ownership, where owning your value is critical; where developing a personal brand that’s full of opinions and points of view, is exactly what gets you notoriety, or where bucking the norms of your category and standing alone, is what creates a valuable brand?

It feels antithetical and deeply uncomfortable. It causes many women to opt out, to dilute the extent of their ambition and to play it safe. They’ll wait to earn their space, rather than just claiming it. They’ll play a safer game of selling their services, rather than building a powerful brand and business that’s bigger than the thing they do.

That keeps women stuck for too long in the comfortable weeds of the day-to-day, being the ‘doer’ rather than the CEO or visionary. The place of frustration, dysfunction, burnout and capped ambition.

The barriers are real at every level, so it’s not just about mindset. The systemic divide in women’s access to help at every stage – from start-up funding* through to platforms for profile building, to being considered by buyers to exit – means that everything feels hard.

In my experience, having worked with hundreds of women starting, scaling and exiting businesses, when women curb their own ambition, it’s rarely due to a lack of desire and more often about a lack of belief in their ability to leap across the divide.

And when women keep their ambition on the vision board, rather than on the plan, they take themselves out of the race and everyone loses out. They don’t get to stretch themselves and to realise what they’re capable of, they and their families don’t get to benefit from the rewards and the world doesn’t get the impact of these women’s ideas and influence.

This is why we need a stampede of female unicorns ready to change the status quo. We won’t get there by playing a quiet, women-only game online, or by waiting on the sidelines until it’s our turn, or until the systemic barriers drop. It has to be something we grab with both hands today – and it requires a completely fresh mindset shift.

Whether you want to create a $billion ‘unicorn’ business or not, ramping up the scale of your ambition changes the energy in your business. If you’d like to join the stampede, here’s a question to consider –

Q. If you were building your business to sell it (and let’s think about a lucrative exit), how would that change things today?

I have some ideas.

You’d probably spend a lot less time worrying about your own credibility, experience and abilities and a lot more time thinking about building a business that’s bigger than you. You might hire, evolve your offering, work out how you could create partnerships and affiliations to augment what you have already. It would put you into challenge solving mode and take you out of self-reflection.

You’d know that being a good version of the rest of your category was no longer going to cut it, so you’d be looking out for a high-value space to own. You’d have to have a point of view on where your category space was headed and how you can leverage that. You’d be positioning you and your business for a real valuable difference.

You’d obsess over the size and impact of your profile. You’d think bigger than a social media following and you’d be looking to get strategic about what you stand for, how you communicate it and the channels that would do that most credibly. You’d be visible, yes, but with a robust plan behind it.

You’d create assets and intellectual property because you’d know that when you’re no longer there with your hands on everything, the business would need to run beautifully. You’d make your thinking, your brand positioning and your ideas tangible. You’d be creating valuable assets to sell.

This is the kind of thinking that changes the energy for the founder, as well as the real-world impact of the business. It’s the kind of momentum that demands attention and sits differently amongst its competitive set. It’s the way, as female founders, with credible perspectives and ideas, that we create the stampede.

Who’s in?

*In 2023 female-founded businesses received an average of £763,000 in funding, compared to £4.7 million for a male-led equivalent. In 2022, only 2% of all venture capital funding, went to female businesses.

Emma Gage is a brand and business strategist for female entrepreneurs and the founder of The Wild Ones, which has a mission to blow the gender-based disruption gap wide open and start a stampede of female unicorns. She helps create disruptive business strategies for women who want to grow unicorn businesses.

www.thewildones.io