Scaling with purpose

As we celebrate International Women’s Day on the 8th March under this year’s theme, ‘Rights. Justice. Action.’, it’s a timely opportunity to spotlight how dismantling barriers and creating equal opportunities can drive meaningful change in the workplace. Here, seven founders share candid lessons on building and scaling businesses, reflecting on the barriers they’ve navigated and the practical steps they’ve taken to create fairer, more sustainable workplaces.

Designing for capacity from the inside out
As founder of The Change Canvas, HR executive, coach, and author of Anchored, Rochelle Trow has seen how exposed leadership can become without the right infrastructure, buffers, or role separation. “At the very start of building a business, when you’re responsible for everything, it’s easy for pace, overextension, and constant availability to become the unspoken norm – long before a team even exists,” she explains.

Trow notes that what feels temporary in the early stages often becomes what ultimately scales. “From analysing growing businesses, I see the same pattern repeatedly: fairness and sustainability are often treated as things to fix later. Founders unintentionally model overcapacity as competence, and that behaviour hardens as teams grow,” she says.  “The real opportunity early on is to design for capacity from the inside out – being intentional about pace, boundaries, and recovery – because what a founder normalises under pressure becomes the blueprint others inherit,” she concludes.

The balance between certainty and doubt
For many female founders, leadership brings a particular dilemma. They are expected to project certainty to be taken seriously by investors, clients, and teams, yet the reality of building and scaling a business is constant uncertainty. The question becomes: how can doubt be used constructively? “Finding the balance on this tightrope is key. Too much certainty and founders risk becoming rigid; too much doubt and progress stalls,” says Jenny Williams, founder of Jenny Williams Coaching, and author of Brilliant Doubt.

Williams reflects on working with a founder-led business, where the leader began to question whether their Chief Product Officer was the right person for the next stage of growth. “They were talented and deeply invested, but the next phase of innovation demanded different capabilities. The founder’s doubt about the role was valid, and their personal doubt about letting go was a deeply human response,” she explains.

What helps leaders move forward, Williams argues, is not eliminating doubt but working with it. She describes doubt as the “engine of truth” – often uncomfortable but necessary for development. Doubt, when used actively, can provide as much direction as certainty.

A different model of growth
For Angela Rixon, founder of The Centre for Meaningful Work and author of Meaning Over Purpose, growth requires challenging conventional beliefs. “I originally felt pressure to grow in ways that looked more ‘typical’: bigger teams, faster expansion. But I had to unlearn the belief that scale equals size and choose alignment over optics.” Rather than building headcount and recreating corporate hierarchy, she scaled through expertise, leverage, and intellectual property, investing in research-backed frameworks to build resilience and margin.

As a female founder, Rixon also confronted the assumption that focusing on meaning, culture, and people is ‘soft’ compared with commercial performance. “I rejected that binary. Meaningful work is not charity; it’s a commercial strategy.” She applies this philosophy internally through transparency, equitable access to opportunity, and strengths-based role design. Ultimately, she says, “Alignment drives sustainable margin. When meaning and economics integrate, engagement rises, discretionary effort follows – and growth compounds.”

Community and mentorship are invaluable
“Fostering and interacting with a strong community is invaluable to the success of your business,” emphasises Cien Solon, CEO and Founder of no-code AI platform, LaunchLemonade.

She goes on to explain how the community has played a pivotal role in developing her business. From launching the platform after an experiment with friends and initially bootstrapping funding from the initial user community, to the continued WhatsApp groups amongst users and partners, Cien has intertwined her business with community engagement. Solon is adamant that without this, she would not have gotten where she is today.

During her pre-seed investment round, the community was invaluable: “Without the support from female and diverse founder groups, such as Female Founders Rise, Diversity X, and BAE HQ, I wouldn’t have been able to successfully carry LaunchLemonade’s story through these vital progressive milestones.” 

Solon concludes, “Community has always been at the heart of LaunchLemonade, compounding trust and carrying our story – for female entrepreneurs hold this support, advocacy and mentorship close and together fairer workplaces and success follow.”

Culture is not fixed, it’s designed
For Cassie Davison, founder of Kith & Kin, award-winning hospitality operator, and author of Stand Out Hospitality, her lived hospitality experience in the 1990s shaped her leadership philosophy. Aggression was normalised in kitchens, and long hours were worn as a badge of honour. The most important lesson she has learned as a founder is that culture is not fixed. It is designed. “If we are building businesses, we are shaping that design,” notes Davison. “Once founders understand this, they can stop accepting inherited industry norms as inevitable.”

Davison put this belief into practice by introducing flexibility and protected time off across her venues. The result was not a weaker business, but a stronger one. Staff retention improved, leadership pathways widened, and more talented women were able to stay and progress without choosing between career ambition and family life. This lesson extends beyond hospitality. Businesses reflect the values that shape them. Structures either limit opportunity or expand it. “When founders and leaders take responsibility for culture, they do more than grow businesses; they shape a fairer world, one organisation at a time,” Davison states.

Alignment across all spheres of life
Dr Lilian Ajayi-Ore, founder of the award-winning Global Connections for Women Foundation (GC4W) and author of The Power of the Learning Mindset, highlights that scaling requires a clear mission – one that deserves attention, aligns teams, inspires donors, and contributes meaningfully to addressing challenges both large and small. “What motivates most founders is seeing the transformative power of their work. Reading the stories of women and girls in our programs is a profound source of inspiration for me.”

Some of the early challenges she faced were in maintaining momentum as the organisation evolved, particularly as she transitioned from founder to wife and mother. “I found that harmony comes from knowing when to pause and when to return, particularly when one sphere demands more of your time.” Dr Ore believes that maintaining clarity about how to balance your need for consistency and alignment across all spheres of influence is critical – not only for personal wellbeing but also for the sustainable growth of your organisation.

Leverage personal insight to guide your work and leadership. “By intentionally considering the experiences, needs, and voices of those we serve, we ensure that our organisational practices are culturally sensitive, promote fairness, and are environmentally responsive – supporting meaningful engagement and growth across all levels of our organisations,” she sums up.

Backing yourself up
Lesley Cooper, founder of consultancy WorkingWell, advises female founders to develop confidence in what they are doing from the get-go. “My own challenges stemmed mainly from difficulty squaring my ambitions for the business with caregiving responsibilities, often resulting in scaled-back growth plans because of having to choose between client expectations and family needs.” Organising resources so that the juggling is ‘pain-free’ is a fruitless task – the sense of constantly feeling behind the curve, or that you are somehow ‘getting it wrong’, comes with the territory, she says. “The lesson I wish I had learnt sooner is that I was probably acing it – that those feelings were proof of progress, not failure.”

“There are always plenty of people, often with far less experience of the complexities of building a business, whilst also meeting demanding caregiving responsibilities, who are willing to suggest you are doing it wrong.” She adds that one of the best ways to build that confidence is by networking with entrepreneurial women on a similar path. “The lesson I learned was to back myself, trust my instincts, and accept the discomfort as an inevitable by-product of doing something important,” Cooper concludes.