Empowered Women of Friends Helping at Home

Empowering Women in Business

This month some of our Head Office ladies attended a seminar in Plymouth aiming to empower women in business through gaining confidence in their selves, worth and ability.

Empowering Women in Business is a local network based in Plymouth and established to provide help and support in the area. Through the group and the activities, they run, they want to help build the skills that women need to gain employment, start, and run their own businesses, develop their careers, and support one another.

Empowering Women in Business (empoweringwomenplymouth.com)

Women are so fundamental in driving good business practice and bring a unique perspective, skills, dedication, and strong work ethic.

Key challenges for women in business

Findings reveal experiences of sexism and gender bias in business:

• over a fifth say investors, colleagues, or customers make quick assumptions about them, or underestimate them when compared to male counterparts

• one in five don’t feel they’re taken seriously compared to males in their industry
• 15 per cent of female entrepreneurs don’t feel they have a loud enough voice, or are heard enough compared to men

Meanwhile, a further 16 per cent of women say they’re not taken as seriously when pitching their product or business.

Friends Helping at Home is forward thinking with the movement for empowering women. Friends Helping at Home have a fantastic Head Office Team which is full of strong women, who are fantastic mentors for leading the way for women in business.

“Working for Friends Helping at Home my confidence has grown tremendously, my opinion is truly valued. I work in a team of incredibly motivated women, who show everyone around them that there are no barriers to achieving your goals if you work hard. I am truly thankful to learn from every one of the powerful women I work alongside.”

– Hazel, Head Office Administrator – Supporting Compliance and Quality

Friends Helping at Home has independent women throughout the company as our Service Providers are predominately female, everyone empowered and in charge of their workload, work-life balance and progression, something unique to the “Friends” way of working.

“I am truly delighted to be involved in a successful, forward-thinking business that enables everyone to flourish and become the best that they can be, developing latent skills and supporting everyone to ‘take the next step’.  In no small part, the success [of Friends] is its people living up to one simple, clear vision that is solution focused and a culture and business structure that enables everyone to benefit.  We are a female centric business with female Directors and senior managers taking the lead in every aspect of the business at every level. We didn’t set out with this particular noble ambition of enabling women to get into business. It just happened. Men are also most welcome! Maybe we just have the right conditions that are a good fit for those wanting to develop careers in what still seems to be male dominated in the Boardroom.

Pioneering: my great-grandmother (silver-haired,
glasses, pictured on the right of the central table)
well-travelled champion of women in business.

The Waldorf-Astoria                             May 10, 1938

This article is also very apt for me personally and our family. My Great-grandmother was the founder of the Torquay Soroptomists in the 1920s, which was pioneering, being part of an international network that set out to help the advancement of women through education and support. (www.sigbi.org) “Molly” Shambrook had been widowed in 1911, the year that my grandmother was born, and took over the running of a hotel business, the Chillingworth Hotel (latterly the Rainbow) which she developed and expanded from the 1920s, until her death.  She never retired or wanted to. She travelled the world, Canada, the USA and Europe at a time when ‘women just knew their place’.   I never knew my great-grandmother, but her story still has an impact today, my daughters being the fifth generation and growing up knowing that their gender shouldn’t be an excuse, barrier or glass ceiling to any aspiration! When she died, Molly’s business estate was left entirely to my grandmother’s brother, so with almost nothing she set up her own business and then subsequently helped my father to take his first steps into business. The Friends culture seems to embody that pioneering spirit today.”

– Andrew Richardson, Founder & Chief Executive Officer

Find out more about what makes us different!

Find out more about our mission and what we do at Friends Helping at Home.

Figure and statistics contained in this blog are credited from https://www.simplybusiness.co.uk/