Single Mums x Soho House
This week I've been writing for Entrepreneur Magazine, Grazia and Forbes.
I spent a day at my daughter's school — a fiercely feminist girls' school in Brighton — talking entrepreneurship, brands and disruption with young women who fully intend to build billion-dollar businesses by the time they're twenty-one.
It's brought everything into sharp relief.
You don't have to go far on the internet to find a warm, positive affirmation about women needing to be braver, know their worth, aim higher. And look — it's not wrong. But in the messy middle of building a business, knowing you need to be braver and actually knowing what that means are two very different things.
For a long time, it became another thing to beat myself up about. You'd be able to pay the mortgage if you just got on camera more. That twenty-year-old coach says so.
Here's what I actually think: it is genuinely hard to be visionary and big-thinking when you're also worrying about the VAT bill. Those two states don't coexist easily. The pressure of survival and the expansiveness of ambition pull in opposite directions. And no amount of positive affirmation resolves that tension — it just adds guilt to the pile.
The other thing that doesn't help: being a founder is one of the loneliest jobs in the world. You spend a significant amount of time questioning your decisions, comparing yourself to peers, to high-earning friends in corporate, to Elon Musk. That comparison is a complete waste of energy and I say that as someone who has wasted considerable energy on it.
But here's the thing I keep coming back to. The problem for women isn't usually capability. It's permission.
People — often from a place of genuine love — have said to me more times than I can count: Isn't that enough? Do you really need a house that size? Is that level of ambition realistic in your situation? The situation in question being: single mother, building alone, no safety net.
Most men aren't asked these questions. Not because their ambition is more legitimate, but because it's more expected.
So let me be clear about my situation. I don't need the nice house. I want it. I want my Soho House membership. I want holidays for the two of us, adventures, the new car, the pilates class at eleven on a Tuesday. I also want a scalable business, financial independence and work that matters beyond the invoice. Not instead of those things. All of it, together.
That's not greed. That's ambition. And women have been quietly talked out of claiming it for long enough.
The mission behind The Wild Ones is to create what I keep calling a stampede of female unicorns — founders building businesses that are genuinely disruptive, genuinely valuable, genuinely world-changing. Not in a vague, aspirational sense. In a strategic, intentional, category-owning sense.
That won't happen until we're willing to say the big stretchy ambition out loud. Not apologise for it. Not qualify it. Say it, and then build a strategy capable of matching it.
The eleven-to-eighteen-year-olds I met on Tuesday are already there. They're not asking for permission. They're not calibrating their ambition against what seems realistic for someone in their situation.
They're just building.
