Nehal Gupta
A creative-in-training

Start-Her

Start-Her will be a mentorship service, incubator and employer of young female entrepreneurs. We will employ 5 school leavers / university graduates every year, providing them with a monthly income as well as office space, professional training and regular workshops and events for inspiration and acceleration. These young entrepreneurs will split their time between helping Start-Her grow and setting up their own enterprises. The company will also gain a 10% stake in any business generated within the incubator.  

We will apply for funding from large corporates keen to encourage both enterprise and female empowerment. We will not only ask for money but also resources and training so the women we employ are guaranteed a similar amount of training as those who choose to opt for a graduate job while simultaneously gaining real-world experience setting up their own businesses.

AIMS OF START - HER

1. To generate awareness for female entrepreneurship within universities.

2. To provide guidance to female school and university leavers, who wish to start their own businesses.

3. To give initial financial stability for a select few young, female entrepreneurs in the initial stages of their business.

Start-Her is a social enterprise with three main goals: to generate awareness, to provide guidance and to give financial stability to young women wishing to set up their own businesses. We will generate awareness through creating social media platforms and a website to connect school and university students interested in entrepreneurship. We will then partner with corporate training firms and well-known business to offer networking events and workshops across the country. These could range from introductions to accountancy to coding boot-camps. Our long-term goal is to take on a number of highly impressive school and university leavers each year as interns. These interns will split their time between helping Start-Her grow and setting up their own businesses. We will give them numerous resources, office space and a regular income. The Start-Her programme will compete directly with city graduate programmes giving bright young women an alternative career path at a time when entrepreneurship is crucial to the economy. Eventually we also aspire to serve as a seed fund for female entrepreneurs.


Start-Her will tackle both unemployment and gender inequality within the UK. Studies have shown that women are twice as likely to be entrepreneurially active in the US than they are in the UK. The main reason for this is not risk aversion but actually lower levels of human, social and financial capital. Women are not trained to be entrepreneurs and are also not given financial motivation. Start-Her will plug this noticeable shortage of opportunity in the country and thus encourage more creativity, innovation and enterprise in young women. In the long run we hope to make this a global enterprise.

In the short-term we will make revenue through our events. While most of the events will be free-of-charge for students to attend, they will be charged at a low rate for members of the general public. In addition, we will offer local entrepreneurs across the country a chance to advertise their businesses through stalls, flyers and presentations. We will take a cut of all the sales these businesses make at our events and charge them basic and premium fees for advertising. In the long-run we will generate revenue through gaining a stake in the businesses we fund. Owing to the time we invest in training our entrepreneurs, our model is much more likely to succeed than other seed funds.


Our team consists of three extremely talented individuals who are deeply passionate about social enterprise and helping other women achieve their dreams. We come from various backgrounds and therefore can appreciate all the different ideas that will come to our door. Furthermore, we will operate as equals throughout the entire process because we are able to communicate effectively and efficiently, which allows us to develop innovative ideas. The idea of working as equals to create something better is something that we hope to foster within our growing company as well, since a hierarchical system often is not conducive to new ideas and as a start-up helping other start-ups our goal is to find and develop new ideas that will change industries and the world.