BWIS Scale Up Your Business For The New Year – Surrey Chambers of Commerce Networking Event

Surrey Chambers are excited to announce our newest Business Women in Surrey (BWiS) event designed to help you scale-up your business.

Ever heard the phrase “What got you here, won’t get you there”?

Join us at Guildford Pavilion on Wednesday 15^th November for a BWiS evening of discussion and networking. We’ll explore exactly what this means when it comes to taking your business from start-up to scale-up.

On the panel we’ll hear from 3 phenomenal female entrepreneurs of Surrey businesses that have achieved scale-up success. Our speakers will share their experience, advice, and top tips for scaling up a business. An expo of business services providers, useful for business owners who are looking to take their business to the next level, will be on hand to take questions too!

Strategy, planning, tools, funding, staffing, marketing, leadership, timing… – get bite-sized information to encourage and guide you on your journey from start-up to scale-up.
Enjoy the social networking and make valuable connections. You might just find the inspiration and partners you need are already at your fingertips within the Surrey Chambers network.

Whether you’ve already started your journey to progress from start-up to scale-up or are contemplating it for the future, you will not want to miss this event!

Book your place today: Event Detail – Surrey Chambers Surrey Chambers (surrey-chambers.co.uk)

Agenda:
5pm                 Welcome drinks
5:30pm            Panel discussion hosted by BWiS Chair Jarmila Yu
6:00pm            Expo & open networking
7:30pm            Event close

Event Kindly Sponsored by NatWest

Panel Moderator:
Jarmila Yu

Founder of YUnique Marketing Ltd. & Chair of Business Women in Surrey
A globally ranked Top100 CMO and a Chartered Marketer, multi award-winning businesswoman and proud mum, Jarmila is passionate about supporting her home county of Surrey. She is often invited to share her insights on marketing and business transformation at events and in the media.
She’s on a business mission to bring strategic marketing excellence within reach of ambitious entrepreneurs, start-ups and SMEs, not just large corporations. Her consultancy also provides the full spectrum of marketing project expertise all led from a Chief Marketing Officer’sperspective, on a bespoke on-demand basis, ensuring both time and cost-effectiveness and maximum impact, supporting business leaders to launch, grow or transform their business.

Panellists include:

Julianne Ponan

Julianne was diagnosed with severe anaphylaxis at two years old, she has multiple allergies to all peanuts, treenuts, sesame, chickpeas and more. She is the founder and CEO of Creative Nature a Top 14 allergen free brand, through her own experiences and challenges living with allergies she focused on Creative Nature to be at the forefront of ‘free from’ innovation, pushing the boundaries and launching a range of free from foods with good nutrition from baking to snacks!
Julianne was awarded an MBE in the New Years Kings Honours in 2023 for Business, Export and helping people with allergies.
Creative Nature has grown from strength to strength launching the brand into Sainsbury’s, Ocado, Co-op, Asda, Tesco exports to 16 countries including the UAE.
Julianne is an allergy advocate fighting for change, making people with allergies lives easier and less stressful, and regularly featuring their stories on her blog. She has spoken at the Houses of Parliament, been a guest judge on Britain’s Next Top Model,  is a judge for the Free From Food Awards and an ambassador for the Anaphylaxis Campaign and more recently Julianne has just been appointed as the first Medic Alert ambassador in 65 years. Medic Alert is a charity that saves lives through their medical id’s.

Julianne is also on the Forbes 30 under 30 List, she was voted by the public as the Guardian’s Leader of the Year and is a Virgin Start Up Mentor.

Mandira Sarkar

Mandira moved to the UK, not knowing how to cook – she missed the cook more than she missed her parents! After 17 years as a management consultant she gave up a career to do something “her parents would heartily disapprove of” and set up Mandira‘s kitchen with an initial £750 investment as a series of supper clubs from her living room. The business has since grown manifold to incorporate Freezer Meals a café and a catering element and operates out of its present location – a 400 year old cowshed based in the Surrey hills overlooking the beautiful Silent Pool. Mandira‘s kitchen is now counted as one of Surrey’s most successful artisan food businesses. It has won a host of awards and accolades including many great taste stars, Surrey’s best start up, Business person of the year and been featured on Channel 4, BBC Country File and many national publications such as the Guardian, Telegraph etc to name but a few.
Mandira lives in Guildford with her car mad husband, daughter and a velcro Pug. In her (non existent) spare time she lives to travel, read , cook and hopes to write a book someday.

Helen Cannon

Helen, founder and CEO of ISON Travel, is on a mission to enable everybody to do the job they love by working flexibly around their individual circumstances. Mum of five, Helen employs a diverse workforce of talent, 70% female and 50% part time who have delivered 4x growth in 2 years. Flexibility is crucial to Helen, as it is for many, so she makes it a point of hiring people based on their expertise and skills alone, not how many hours they can do or where they can work from geographically.

Helen founded ISON Travel in 2013 after nine years of raising her 5 children. She knew she couldn’t find a role or employer who would offer the flexibility she needed to balance family and work-life, so Helen decided to start her own travel company.

ISON Travel manages business and leisure travel for companies and private individuals, they have been on an incredible mission since 2013 and especially over the past three years. The pandemic had a devasting impact on the travel sector. Many competitors made staff redundant or closed their doors for good. In contrast Helen decided to increase investment in staff which led to a loss that year. Whilst this seemed risky, Helen was confident travel would return. When it did Helen wanted to be ready with the best team. As a result ISON was probably the first company in their sector to reach and then exceed 2019 levels, which they did in 2021. ISON saw exponential growth in 2022, when staff levels, revenue and profit tripled 2022 levels, making them five times largely than pre-pandemic.  Helen has been awarded Business Person of the Year, Company of the Year and has made the shortlist at the Everywoman Awards for Mumpreneur of the Year 2023.

Expo stands:
AE Accountax
Enterprise M3
HJP Chartered Financial Planners
Hoolock Consulting
HR Dept
HX Solutions
MJP Deans
Surrey Event Professionals
The Corporate Escape Club
UK Business Mentoring
University of Surrey
Your Startup Partner
Yunique Marketing