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Resilient Female Entrepreneur Shares how Funding Failures Drove her to Success

by Staff GBAF Publications Ltd
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307 - Entrepreneur Tribune | Entrepreneur | TechnologyBy Nada Aliredha, CEO and Founder of PLIM Finance

Why do we become entrepreneurs? The answer is not a career – it’s who you are.

As a global businesswoman and now CEO and Founder of PLIM Finance, I have faced my share of failures in my time as an entrepreneur as many other females in the trade have. With statistics such as 48% of all investment teams not including a single woman, the odds appeared to be stacked against me. However, now beta launching my BNPL and Marketplace service, PLIM, in 2022, it is important to highlight how passion and drive have allowed myself and can allow other women that relate to my story, to defy odds and paint their own successes.

Women face challenges on many levels; to overcome the challenges, you have to keep failing. With every failure you learn something about business and about yourself. To succeed you must have a strong support system at home, the right idea at the right time, and funding. Access to funding is one of the largest challenges a woman in business can face; often female founders can be undermined by male counterparts, and this is solidified with facts such as less than 1% of all UK venture funding being awarded to all-female teams. However, funding is crucial when it comes to building your reputation in the business world, so how do we overcome this challenge, especially as women in business?

I started my journey in Franklin College, Switzerland, studying International Finance, later progressing to achieve a Diploma in Buying & Merchandising from London School of Fashion. I later achieved my certification in the Professional Education Program: Think Tank on Global Education from Harvard School of Education Boston. Yet despite my educational successes, there were still bumps in my journey to becoming a business owner.

I began to build my profile of success over the decade following my academic achievements, applying my international education to several well-established, global business in a wide range of sectors while supporting other businesswomen. Yet despite my in-depth CV, it seemed that there were still major challenges that I struggled to overcome alone: In my first venture I was told I will never be able to raise funds without a male partner, so for years I tried to fight and resist and advocate but at the end I was unable to do it.

The lack of belief from those able to give me the funding that I needed as a start-up business owner meant that I was forced to partner up in order to prove my own abilities. In my next venture I hired a male partner and it worked. As soon as we raised, and we were on our way, I no longer needed a male partner to prove I could do the job alone.  I had to work with the prejudices in the industry in order to achieve my goal and prove that I had the capabilities of being a successful woman in a male dominated world. Access to funding is crucial for any business, allowing for the ability to hire a strong team and grow your business faster and in turn creating credibility. That is why working with these prejudices was so important to get what I set out to achieve.

Despite the bumps in the road, I have been able to harness my rejections in order to feed my passion for helping female business owners to progress and flourish. I have proudly worked as a part of the UN Alumni Association, working to advance female empowerment and promote women’s rights and gender equality, in order to move towards a world where women do not have to struggle as I did. I’ve worked with female CEOs who struggle to balance home and work, not because they are incapable, but because they lack the support. The ones that succeed and are happy are the ones that don’t apologize for being imbalanced, and the ones who ask for help. The advice might be controversial, but it’s honest. What I found most useful is Bruce Lees advise “be like water”. Although it may be tempting to attempt to defy odds alone, swimming against the tide is a waste of energy. The best way to change mindsets is to succeed.

As we progress to a business world with a growing female population, resilience and determination to prove attitudes wrong should motivate you to achieve the goals you set out for yourself and your business. Instead of resisting failure it is important to embrace it, using our innovation to adapt our business plans, and that is what my journey highlights. If you keep failing and keep restarting, you will succeed – resilience is the way to overcome challenges.