SP OTLIGH T

Jarmila Yu

Jarmila is the Founder, Consulting Chief Marketing Officer and Managing Director of YUnique Marketing. Here she tells us of her journey...

Like many, I left university with a degree, but no idea about which career I wanted to pursue. I started work as the sole sales and marketing employee of a small software start-up company, and was responsible for rapid growth in both sales and team size. I then moved on through progressively larger companies – predominantly in the tech sector – until I ended up in senior marketing leadership roles in large multi-nationals like IBM.

However, I never felt completely fulfi lled working for a massive enterprise, no matter how senior the role. So, with some trepidation and minimal funding, I founded YUnique Marketing Ltd in March 2016. I wanted to make the knowledge, experience and mentorship of a Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) accessible to smaller businesses and make a real impact to the SMEs that form the backbone of UK PLC.

I realised that what they needed was a flexible, on-demand consulting CMO service and that’s the niche I aimed to fi ll. As the business grew, I offered a potentially challenging proposal to my husband. I asked David to join me as a partner when the marketing franchise he was contracted to came up for renewal. I can’t guarantee that working with your life partner is the right choice for every couple, but for us it has worked out well – thankfully!

2019 was a tough year business-wise as many companies held off on investing in marketing due to uncertainty over Brexit. Then we both got COVID pretty badly in March 2020 and were bed-ridden with very high fevers for two solid weeks, followed by a further couple of months of recuperation. It was a very worrying time for both of us and our two teenage daughters who had to look after themselves.

When we recovered, I took time to strengthen my probono engagement with the various education and business institutions I was involved with, and volunteered for more mentoring and coaching.

As businesses re-emerged from lockdown, my raised profi le (Chair of Institute of Directors Surrey; Chair of the Business Women in Surrey group etc.) and our flexible, accessible and cost-effective offering have thankfully led to a significant upturn for our company. The past 12 months have been our most successful so far.

I am a passionate believer in the power of good businesses to make the world a better place and I am dedicated to empowering those who embrace profit and purpose through marketing excellence.

www.yuniquemarketing.com

Kristina Pereckaite

Kristina founded the Sussex-based angel investor network, South East Angels, to respond to the gap for early-stage investment in the region. Here is her story… www.southeastangels.co.uk

From starting with five members in November 2020, South East Angels has grown to become the most active angel investor group in Brighton, with members having invested £1m in innovative startups to date.

Investor members are local high net-worth individuals who have either previously built and sold a company themselves or have invested in a number of startups already. Kristina appreciates having a varied skillset and different backgrounds in their group, meaning members bring different perspectives to all the opportunities they look at.

In a male-dominated industry and a complex ecosystem, Kristina has built one of the few female-led angel groups in the country, and created a go-to hub for local founders to raise early-stage funding and a valuable community for angel investors where they can connect, learn, and grow.

Over the past ten years, female angel investors have been involved in deals worth £2.34 billion, backing over a thousand female-founded businesses and helping to create more than 10,000 jobs, according to a recent study published by Beauhurst and the UK Business Angels Association.

But out of the 36,800 angel investors in the UK, only 14% of them are women.

Gender diversity is not the only challenge. Just 1% of angel investors are black, and there is a general lack of diversity of thought and experience to appropriately represent the need for capital and innovation. Kristina is on a mission to change this with the ‘Future Angels’ initiative, which aims to encourage more women into angel investing through education and networks.

In order to act on rectifying the findings of The Alison Rose Review of Female Entrepreneurship report published in 2019, the Investing in Women Code is a government initiative, supported by the UK Business Angels Association, for organisations who provide finance to entrepreneurs to commit to supporting equality in all their interactions with entrepreneurs.

South East Angels has signed the code as a commitment to supporting diversity in access to finance. All companies who sign the code commit to providing data on application and investment activity, disaggregated by gender, and will be collated in an annual report by the Department of Business and Trade.

It is also a commitment to adopting internal practices that aim to improve the potential for female entrepreneurs to successfully access the tools, resources, investment and finance they need to build and grow their businesses.

South East Angels was recently awarded Dynamic’s Best New Business Award.

Workplaces across the country aren’t providing working mothers with the support packages, pay-rises and promotions they need –according to an extensive new survey of 6,000 UK professionals.

The survey from specialist recruitment firm Robert Walters found that the odds are truly stacked against working mothers – both those living with their partners and those living alone/without a partner