Jackie Brierton is more than just a champion of women in business. As founder and Chair of Women’s Enterprise Scotland (WES), she lives and breathes female entrepreneurship. For 30 years, Jackie has worked in business, enterprise and policy development across the UK, as well as her native Scotland. She’s someone who passionately believes in the power of mentoring to further women’s progress as business leaders across all sectors. We caught up with her to find out more about mentoring for women in Scotland.

Wednesday 19th November was Women’s Entrepreneurship Day, a significant date in Jackie’s diary. In the run up to this global day of celebration for women-led businesses, her organisation, Women’s Enterprise Scotland, conducted an online survey. It asked women business owners in Scotland which issues were key to them when it came to running and growing their enterprises.

The survey results showed that 90% of those women who had used a mentor had found the experience helpful, making it vital that mentoring is made as accessible as possible to as many women as possible. Jackie says:

43% of the women WES surveyed said they’d already benefited from mentoring. They see mentoring as a really important part of their ongoing development.

"43% of the women WES surveyed said they’d already benefited from mentoring. They see mentoring as a really important part of their ongoing development. We’re getting great support from the Scottish Government, Business Mentoring Scotland and all the other key agencies to look at how we can ensure that mentoring is available to any woman who wants it".

"In Scotland, we’re lucky enough to have the Women’s Enterprise Framework and Action Plan, of which mentoring is one of the five key strands of development."

The Women’s Enterprise Framework and Action Plan, which was also launched on Women’s Entrepreneurship Day, includes a network of women’s ambassadors who have been handpicked to provide women with ‘real’ role-models; women whose achievements are attainable, as Jackie explains:

"Many of the ambassadors are mentors in their own right, but as role models they’re providing an important illustration of the fact that women can run businesses successfully in any sector".

These are real women running real businesses and many of them have overcome lots of hurdles to get there.

"We’ve deliberately chosen people who are not all high profile or already in the news every other day. These are real women running real businesses and many of them have overcome lots of hurdles to get there. That’s an integral part of mentoring – being a role model and showing women what’s possible".

As well as her role for Women’s Enterprise Scotland, Jackie runs a small enterprise support organisation in Perthshire – GrowBiz. Mentoring is at the top of the agenda there too:

"We’ve trained individual mentors and we also have a very well developed peer-mentoring network. Every month we have anything up to half a dozen peer groups meeting, to look at a specific issues or just to provide general support to each other. That’s been really successful."

With help from RBS Inspiring Enterprise, GrowBiz’s client base is 70% women and for some of them, mentoring has had a life-changing impact. Jackie tells us of a visit her team made to a local chicken factory on the brink of making 200 redundancies. GrowBiz hoped to highlight the idea of self-employment as a feasible route for some of those facing redundancy and let them know about the support available. Jackie remembers one woman who seized this opportunity:

We met a lady named Margaret who had worked in the chicken factory since she was 16 years old. She’d never known anything else but she’d always secretly dreamt of being a self-employed carer.

"We met a lady named Margaret who had worked in the chicken factory since she was 16 years old, for 31 years. She’d never known anything else but she’d always secretly dreamt of being a self-employed carer helping elderly people and people with special needs."

"Since she was made redundant in February, Margaret has had help identifying training and marketing herself, matched with a local mentor, and she’s become a self-employed carer. She’s now so busy with clients that she can’t take any more on. This shows how mentoring and the right kind of support can fundamentally help somebody to change their life".

Asked about the specific challenges faced by female entrepreneurs and how mentors can respond to them affectively, Jackie explains that for women, the business growth trajectory can be a little different from the traditional model:

Women in the early stages of running a business may well have family responsibilities or may even still be holding down a job. The mentor has to really understand the pressure that brings to a new business.

"Women in the early stages of running a business may well have family responsibilities or may even still be holding down a job. The mentor has to really understand the pressure that brings to a new business. They need to get away from the thinking that says ‘you start a business, you grow it, you reach a certain level…’ That’s a very neat, upward trajectory but often women take a more zigzag journey. It’s about helping them to understand that that’s actually OK".

Building women’s confidence and reinforcing their belief in their own capabilities is another area where Jackie feels mentoring can be a positive force. Although a woman may be talented and her business good, she may not have the self-belief this success warrants, something a mentoring relationship can remedy:

"There’s a key role for mentors to help women to understand that they’re achievers and to help them put their achievements into perspective. When a woman is strong and confident about what she’s doing, and assertive within her business that’s often seen as a negative, as if she’s just being a bit ‘bolshie’. I think women need support to be much more self-assured about how they go about their business".

Jackie feels that during the course of her career there’s been great progress made for and by female entrepreneurs, although there’s a long way to go:

We need to really work hard for young women to make sure they see enterprise and business as an option.

"When I started working in this area, fewer than 12% of businesses were female owned. It’s still not high enough at about 1 in 5 businesses but you find women in every sector now. If you analyse the business pages in the traditional press, as I sometimes do, depressingly it’s still a male image of business. We need to really work hard for young women to make sure they see enterprise and business as an option".

"We’re very lucky in Scotland because we’ve got a supportive Government. We’re a partner in Scotland CAN DO, which is about realising our potential to be a world-leading entrepreneurial and innovative nation. Enterprise was devolved back in ’99, with the first Scottish parliament. Since then we’ve continued to build our own enterprise ecosystem, including Business Gateway and many interesting smaller organisations too. We all work well together and there’s lots of connectivity".

As Women’s Enterprise Scotland continues to raise understanding of the particular issues that matter to female business-leaders, Jackie outlines one of her organisation’s key findings:

I think that’s what a good mentor is – it’s looking at the whole person.

"The feedback we’ve had, within our survey and certainly through all the networking we do, is that women are looking for a holistic approach to mentoring. They want someone who will understand their personal life and development needs as well as their business needs. I think that’s what a good mentor is – it’s looking at the whole person".

The IOEE is delighted to be working with the Women’s Enterprise Scotland team on a Meet A Mentor event in Glasgow.

For more information and to register interest in the upcoming Meet A Mentor events visit www.ioee.uk/meetamentor.