SBE Australia empower female entrepreneurs to redress the gender imbalance in the leadership of hi-tech ventures.
SBE Australia is a not-for-profit expert community, helping female founders gain the skills, knowledge, confidence and networks to take their business further. The organisation aims to right a significant imbalance in the leadership of mature, growing tech ventures, the vast majority of which are currently headed up by men.
“Many women don’t consider getting investment in their business, or don’t know how to go about getting it if they do consider it,” says SBE Australia’s Chair & Springboard Enterprises Alumna (2000), Kerri Lee Sinclair. “Global and local research shows female business leaders and entrepreneurs do not have the same access to high-growth capital as their male counterparts due to smaller networks.
SBE Australia has been curating and developing these networks globally for female entrepreneurs for six years in this country, having been launched on the back of SBE that started in the United States in 2000. Globally, the organisation’s Springboard Enterprise Programs have empowered a community of 685 women entrepreneurs to collectively raise nearly $8 billion in capital, and achieve 15 IPOs and over 175 Mergers & Acquisitions events. Since 2013 SBE Australia has seen alumnae of its Springboard Enterprise Programs raise $207 million, with 85 per cent of those alumnae winning some funding and two successfully executing an IPO.
SBE Australia aim to get in touch with women early in their entrepreneurial journey and help them realise their potential, as statistics show that female entrepreneurs who do manage to gain funding make their businesses very successful.
“Generally, women are better at managing money and saving it, but when they do get investment they are proven to be better at using investment and growing their business than men,” Kerri Lee tells us.
SBE Australia’s licensed Life Sciences Springboard Enterprises Accelerator and its broader, earlier stage E3: Empower, Evolve, Escalate program, for women founders and business leaders, connects female founders with industry experts, global alumnae, a peer network of key influencers and investors to provide them with the support, tools, expert knowledge and confidence to aim higher in the ambitions they have for their businesses and accelerate their growth.
These support networks are carefully vetted to ensure that the people who come in to assist the programs are there for the right reasons, and are prepared to invest their time and their advice, even if they decide not to invest their money.
The programs concentrate on female-led businesses in their first three to four years of operation. Access to them is competitive, and to qualify businesses must have a female entrepreneur with equity in the business and who has influence in the way it is run. They must have a minimum-viable product and have some customers. The business must also be “investable” – scalable in terms of growth and with the potential to benefit from significant funding.
One of the biggest issues female founders face, once they have realised the opportunities capital would offer them, is where to go to find it.
“Many businesses go from one Venture Capitalist to another looking for money, without researching properly, Kerri Lee says. “We aim to help them be smarter in how they go about seeking out capital.”
Those female founders who do make it get into on one of SBE’s programs are ostensibly pioneers. The small business and start-up sector generally is very well represented by women – indeed over half of the winners of the Inside Small Business Top 50 Business Leaders in the two years we have run the report are female – but the story in the field of technology is very different. Kerri Lee acknowledges that this fact is widely known and discussed, but that awareness alone about the problem is not doing anything to redress the balance.
“Generally, women are better at managing money and saving it, but when they do get investment they are proven to be better at using it and growing their business than men.”
“We want to change the topic of the conversation from ‘Me too’ to ‘What do we do about it?’” Kerri Lee explains. “We constantly complain about the weather but we live here, so what do we do? We carry an umbrella. In the same way we want to change the conversation from talking in circles about the dearth of female founders in tech and instead come up with practical ways to address the issue.”
And Kerri Lee believes that there may be a bigger issue with entrepreneurship in Australia than gender, suggesting that perhaps we are just very risk-averse in general.
“We need to be more focused on outcomes, rather than just acknowledging that there’s something holding us back. We recently ran a series of events in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne. We wanted the debate to be as inclusive as possible rather than just being predominately women talking about the barriers they face, Kerri Lee tells me. “We managed to pitch the topic in such a way that lots of men attended, which to me was profound. We don’t want to just ‘beat men up’ about the issue as that won’t solve anything, we need to involve them in finding a solution.”
While ensuring the wider debate is continued and expanded to include all the stakeholders – men and women, founders and mentors – SBE Australia are growing their reach in terms of offering practical support, thanks in no small part to the drive of their recently-appointed CEO, Jodie Iman.
Thanks to support from LaunchVic, as part of that organisation’s mission to bring leading global accelerators to Victoria, SBE Australia will be funded to deliver the Accelerator program licensed from the Springboard Enterprises Health Innovation Hub, directly from the USA, to more than 20 female entrepreneurs over the next three years. Also with LaunchVic support, SBE Australia will run community events as well as its E3 program for more than 60 earlier stage female-led businesses in Melbourne over the same period. The E3 program operates as an eight-module program, providing hands-on learning experience delivered through its network of industry leaders, providing technology and life science start-ups the fundamentals and tools they need to become investor ready.
“We are all aligned when female-founded companies succeed,” Kerry Lee concludes.” Not only economically, but also as a society, due to the flow on benefits we experience”.
Tim Ladhams, Editor, Inside Small Business.
