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THREE’S COMPANY: Paulette West with Patrick Passley and Herman Irish

THE FEMME Programme (Female Enterprising Motivational Modelling Excellence) will provide budding black women entrepreneurs with advice on issues such as professional development, networking, team building and work life balance.

The FEMME Programme is the brainchild of Paulette West, the former chair of Barclays Bank Cultural Diversity Network who now runs networking organisation the Gap Network.

“Our target audience is women who are thinking about setting up their own business or who may have just started” she told The Voice.

“ They may have a question or a problem but they don’t know who to go to. For example, I recently met one woman who came to one of our events who had been running her own business but she didn’t have a business account, she didn’t have a business plan and was doing everything on her own.

“Because of my connections I was able to get her the help that she needed. It was these kind of experiences that led me to set up the GAP (Growing, Aspiring People) Network, the umbrella organisation that FEMME is a part of.

“Many people from black and minority ethnic communities often face challenges such as funding and a lack of information as to how to set up their own company or social enterprise.

“I realised that there was a gap in the market whereby people didn‘t have the knowledge they really needed. FEMME will take that idea forward by focusing on new female entrepreneurs.”

Another key part of the programme will be talks by leading figures from the black and minority ethnic business community.

The black business community forms a vital part of London's economy. Today there are more than 10,000 black-owned private sector businesses in London.

Black businesses no longer simply specialise in a few industries, serving niche markets, but cover many mainstream market sectors.

Their combined annual turnover exceeds £4.5 billion according to a recent report from the London Development Agency, and they provide over 70,000 jobs to London's economy.

A number of other reports point to the importance of black women as an important part of this trend.

According to West, this trend may not continue if budding businesswoman to not have access to the kind of advice that will help them avoid some of the pitfalls of running a business.

However, whilst FEMME aims to provide an important networking and business advice function, a key part of the programme is inspiring potential businesswoman.

“Inspiration can go a long way” said West. “I want the FEMME Network to focus on inspiring and motivating female entrepreneurs. At our inspirational talks, I will only have speakers that people can relate to, who are dynamic and who have a story to tell. I’ve been to a lot of events and I’ve been quite bored.

“Often they are quite dull and they haven’t been real. They haven’t had speakers with real life stories who have come from nowhere and have achieved.”

Indeed, there are many within the black business community who say West herself has just such a story.

Having left school at sixteen she joined Barclays Bank and rose quickly up the career ladder winning numerous awards and going on to chair the Barclays’ Cultural Diversity Network.

“I left school with three O levels. However I’ve won awards and I ended up looking after 1500 people all around the country whilst I was at Barclays.

“I tell people about my own journey, how I achieved what I did and what drove me to do it to show that if you’ve got the passion, drive, motivation you can achieve anything you want.”

Published: 10 May 2008
Issue: 1320

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