Women's Business

In this episode I interview executive coach and author of More Money, More Life Sarah Bennett-Nash, who spent 20 years in investment banking, including roles at Goldman Sachs before moving into coaching and changing her relationship with work and money.
Sarah discusses growing up with a strong work ethic, navigating boys’ clubs, undermining and imposter syndrome, and watching loud voices win while competent people stayed invisible. She shares how a £150K “cowboy builder” crisis pushed her to monetise her skills to build her business and podcast. Loads to get into here around money stories, shame, undercharging, alignment with values, and women finding sovereignty through confidence, community, and visibility.
Find Sarah on LinkedIn here
The women Sarah shouted out were Bijal Shah and Deborah Frances-White (AKA The Guilty Feminist)
Join the conversation with me on Instagram here
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This episode is sponsored by Ivy.
Ivy makes organic cotton essentials - t-shirts, sweatshirts, Breton stripes and more - designed for women who are done compromising on quality.
Founded by Sally, a former fashion buyer, Ivy exists because she couldn't find what she needed: sustainably made, great quality basics that actually fit real women living real lives. So she built them herself.
Every piece is made from GOTS-certified organic cotton, produced by a Portuguese factory running on solar power with zero waste to landfill. Good ethics and exceptional quality, in the same place.
The fabric is soft, the fit is considered, and the pieces wash and wear beautifully. Which is why Ivy has one of the highest returning customer rates in its category.
Use code TWC20 for 20% off your first order and shop Ivy here.

My guest this week is Danielle Close - founder of My Skin Feels - a skincare brand using rescued food.
Danielle discusses early lessons about hard work from her entrepreneurial father and teacher mother, struggling in an academic school as a dyslexic student, and finding her way into beauty through makeup training and an early role as Charlotte Tilbury’s PA, where she learned “never take no for an answer.”
After years in beauty and burnout, she moved toward natural and ethical wellness, ultimately founding My Skin Feels - initially inspired by her own anxiety and self-care journey and later defined by making skincare from rescued food byproducts. She explains reverse-engineering formulas to meet performance goals, customer education challenges, and the surprising benefits for skin conditions driven by her rescued food ingredients.
We get into the detail of bootstrapping the business, building sales through relentless market stalls, turning down a Dragon’s Den deal for a better investment deal and her parallel life as a trained fifth-generation psychic medium whose intuition influences her decisions.
This is a fascinating whirlwind!
Find My Skin Feels on Instagram here
Find the My Skin Feels website here
Find Danielle's own website here
Don't forget to join the conversation with me on Instagram here
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This episode is sponsored by Ivy.
Ivy makes organic cotton essentials - t-shirts, sweatshirts, Breton stripes and more - designed for women who are done compromising on quality.
Founded by Sally, a former fashion buyer, Ivy exists because she couldn't find what she needed: sustainably made, great quality basics that actually fit real women living real lives. So she built them herself.
Every piece is made from GOTS-certified organic cotton, produced by a Portuguese factory running on solar power with zero waste to landfill. Good ethics and exceptional quality, in the same place.
The fabric is soft, the fit is considered, and the pieces wash and wear beautifully. Which is why Ivy has one of the highest returning customer rates in its category.
Use code TWC20 for 20% off your first order and shop Ivy here.

My guest this week is Sally McLaren, founder of Ivy - a women’s essentials brand made with certified organic cotton.
In this conversation Sally traces her early exposure to her parents’ family publishing business, her passion for textiles, and a fashion design/buying degree that led to 12 years as a clothing buyer at Boden, George, F&F at Tesco, and Sweaty Betty, where she learned product development, manufacturing, and the ethical and quality compromises driven by margin pressure.
After redundancy and motherhood, she discovered flaws in 50 of her own T‑shirts and launched Ivy in December 2017 with six tees, self-funded by redundancy money and savings, initially fulfilling orders from home while raising two small children.
She describes learning marketing, SEO, and e-commerce by doing, using Instagram, gifting to influencers and stylists, building high repeat purchase through product quality and personal customer relationships, choosing Portugal production over higher-margin options, and aiming to make getting dressed simpler through great essentials and community.
We also talk growth, future plans, and the virtues of running a lifestyle business.
Find Sally and Ivy on Instagram here
Find Ivy's website here . Use code TWC20 for 20% off your first order
The woman Sally shouted out was Leigh Morris (The Redirectory)
Join the conversation with me on Instagram here
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This episode is sponsored by Ivy.
Ivy makes organic cotton essentials - t-shirts, sweatshirts, Breton stripes and more - designed for women who are done compromising on quality.
Founded by Sally, a former fashion buyer, Ivy exists because she couldn't find what she needed: sustainably made, great quality basics that actually fit real women living real lives. So she built them herself.
Every piece is made from GOTS-certified organic cotton, produced by a Portuguese factory running on solar power with zero waste to landfill. Good ethics and exceptional quality, in the same place.
The fabric is soft, the fit is considered, and the pieces wash and wear beautifully. Which is why Ivy has one of the highest returning customer rates in its category.
Use code TWC20 for 20% off your first order and shop Ivy here.

My guest this week is June Angelides MBE, venture partner at Samos Investments, founder of Levare Ventures, and an angel investor. June shares growing up in a Lagos entrepreneurial family, moving to the UK at 17, choosing Reuters for culture fit, and later joining Silicon Valley Bank in London. She describes motherhood reshaping her career and inspiring Mums in Tech, a child-friendly coding school she built in four months with no funding, then ran for three years to teach 250 women, before closing it due to an unsustainable low-price model and burnout. The conversation explores founder grief, boundaries, valuing your time, and how mission and profitability must coexist. June explains VC economics, today’s higher funding bar, bias in fundraising, and choosing capital aligned with your goals, alongside her work backing female-led startups and investing in African pre-seed tech through Levare.
Connect with June on LinkedIn here
The woman June shouted out was Simona Barbieri
Don't forget to follow along with me on Instagram here
And apply to join The Wilder Collective here

My guest this week is writer Caro Giles who talks to me about work, motherhood and sustaining creativity amid care responsibilities. Caro reflects on her parents’ contrasting models of work, her determination to train as an actor, and how class dynamics and financial insecurity in London pushed her toward teaching. She describes becoming a mother of four, then ending her marriage, and raising two autistic daughters, including 12 years of home educating largely because school and support systems failed her family. Writing began as connection and selfhood during isolation, leading to an online master’s, a BBC Countryfile New Nature Writer award, and memoirs Twelve Moons and Unschooled, the latter shaped by tribunals and advocacy. Caro discusses stigma around home education and benefits, precarious creative income, what structural changes she’d make, and hopes for an agent, further books, and blended teaching/retreat work.