The UK is home to some of the most successful female entrepreneurs in the world. While 2020 is proving a difficult year in the world of business due to the coronavirus crisis, these women are working flat-out to keep their enterprises alive.
Here are five of the top female entrepreneurs that the UK has to offer.
Denise Coates
British billionaire Denise Coates is one of the UK’s richest entrepreneurs, having made her fortune through the online gambling company Bet365.
Coates’ father Peter already had a successful chain of betting shops when Denise graduated from university with a first class degree in econometrics.
Eventually the decision was made to expand the portfolio by entering the lucrative online casino market where the industry giant is successfully competing with more established operators in the UK.
It was Denise who was the driving force behind the decision to focus on the online market, registering the domain name Bet365.com and taking charge of that side of the business.
The move proved to be extremely fruitful with Bet365 now one of the world’s largest betting companies, with Coates’ net worth now said to be in the region of $12.2 billion.
Ella Mills
Like Coates, Ella Mills was born with some advantages in life as she is the daughter of a former government minister and supermarket heiress Camilla Sainsbury.
Mills has made a big name for herself, though, through the Deliciously Ella brand that has made her a household name and one of the UK’s top female entrepreneurs before reaching 30.
Deliciously Ella now has products in supermarkets up and down the country with Mills developing the business from humble beginnings as a small hobbyist blog.
What is perhaps most impressive about Mills’ progress is that she has achieved great things despite being diagnosed with Postural Tachycardia Syndrome.
She has also survived controversy over a ‘clean eating’ row a few years ago, emerging relatively unscathed.
Camilla Ainsworth
Operating in a similar area of the market to Mills is Camilla Ainsworth, an entrepreneur who got her big break when she reached the final of the BBC’s reality business show The Apprentice.
Ainsworth’s product is dairy-free gourmet flavoured nut mylks, which she has got into various UK supermarkets despite being just 25 years of age.
Born and raised in Lancashire, Ainsworth is a former law student who has convinced the NHS to make her M+LKPLUS product available to patients.
Ainsworth is still very green, but there is no doubt she is already one of the most successful young female entrepreneurs that the UK has to offer.
Anne Boden
Wales-born Anne Boden is the founder and CEO of UK mobile-only bank Starling Bank, which has been a disruptive presence in the industry over recent years. Boden had an ordinary start in life compared to some of the other female entrepreneurs in this list and has worked in the banking sector since she graduated from the University of Swansea.
Possible Financial Services was the original name of Starling Bank when it was launched by Boden in 2014 and it took 18 months for it to receive its UK banking licence, with the name change to Starling coming in early 2016.
With Starling having around 275,000 customers in the UK, the bank has made Boden extremely rich. Investments from the likes of Austrian-born billionaire Harald McPike have helped to take Starling on to the next level.
Zoe Sugg
YouTube gave Zoe Sugg – better known as Zoella – her start but she has turned social media fame into a career as one of the most successful young female entrepreneurs in the UK. With more than 11 million subscribers on YouTube, Sugg primarily reached a young, female audience and she has used that to her advantage with the recent moves she has made.
Sugg is still just 30 but she has a brand of beauty products, a range of homeware products and a multiple-book deal with Penguin Books. Despite facing criticism over her use of a ghost writer, Sugg’s debut novel Girl Online was a huge smash hit on its release back in 2014, breaking a variety of publishing records.
Zoella is now estimated to be worth millions of dollars, with all eyes on what the entrepreneur decides to do next as she enters the next phase of her career.
