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When publisher Penguin Life first asked serial entrepreneur Sharmadean Reid to write a book, it was supposed to be a straight business bible. What she wrote instead was a manifesto for women, covering everything from healing trauma and controlling your media diet, to how to negotiate and make people feel listened to.
Rather than compartmentalising business advice, New Methods for Women — which launches today — acknowledges the context in which someone’s business success sits, the personal lives that run alongside our work lives, and the inner work that is necessary to achieve outer success. It’s based on Reid’s 20-year career, which has spanned beauty and media startups, fundraising and an MBE.
In 2005, fresh out of Central Saint Martins, Reid founded a fanzine called WAH, which sat at the intersection of music, fashion and feminism. While working simultaneously as a trend consultant and stylist, Reid realised that nail art was about to explode onto the mainstream, and mobilised the WAH community into paying customers of WAH Nails, the cult beauty salon she opened in 2009.
A “whirlwind” followed: within two months of opening, WAH Nails was invited to hold a pop-up in Selfridges. The brand went on to host jumble sales, record launch parties, London Fashion Week shows and events for Nike, Marc Jacobs and Diesel. It secured a coveted spot in the Topshop flagship on Oxford Street, and Reid launched an at-home nail care line to go alongside the salon services. Then, at the height of her early success, Reid started experiencing “debilitating” panic attacks and chronic stress. She left London and moved back to her hometown of Wolverhampton.
In 2017, Reid joined forces with Dan Woodbury and Ken Lalobo to launch Beautystack, a booking app for independent beauty professionals with a social interface similar to Instagram. Within a year, the “see it, like it, book it” app secured her place as the first Black woman in the UK to raise £1 million in venture capital (VC) funding. (According to Extend Ventures, Black women in the UK received just 0.02 per cent of VC funding between 2009-2019. In total, Reid raised £6.5 million for Beautystack between 2018-2022.)
The venture capital industry remains male-dominated, both among the decision makers and the entrepreneurs who succeed in raising investment. Time for a rethink.
When the pandemic hit, Reid pivoted from Beautystack — a business built on in-person experiences — to The Stack World, an online destination for “mission-driven women” to network and learn together. Victoria Prew, founder and CEO of fashion rental platform Hurr, is one of The Stack World’s 22,000 members. She says the community exemplifies Reid’s “secret sauce”, founding “community-driven companies built with women, not for them”.
Reid has mentored and invested in multiple Black female founders. Last year, she posted on LinkedIn about helping one group of founders — including Sojo founder Josephine Philips — set up their own peer group, to support each other through entrepreneurship, a method she has benefited from herself (one of the essays in the book, “Choose Your Front Row”, is all about surrounding yourself with the right kind of support).
“I understand why some women have a scarcity mindset. The numbers around gender equality reinforce the notion that there is simply not enough to go around,” she writes. “But abundant people are my favourite. They have a deep sense of self-worth, knowing they can always generate more. More jobs, more energy, more money. There is enough for everybody.”
Here, Reid shares some of the takeaways from the book.
New Methods for Women is intentionally unconventional as a business book. Why did you approach it this way?
When I started my first business, I just thought it would be fun to open a nail salon. I never considered the systemic challenges in my way, and I think it’s a good job I didn’t. Naivety is what enabled me to take the risk. I have a son, who is of mixed ethnicity, and something I’ve been grappling with is: do you tell someone they are disadvantaged, in order to make them aware and prepared, or do you not say anything, because then they are free to dream?
I credit a lot of my success to reading constantly and hungrily — I learned so much from Principles by Ray Dalio and The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz. But I needed that extra bit of context that acknowledged the additional challenges I might face as a Black woman from a working-class background, navigating entrepreneurship with a child in tow.
In recent years, there has been a lot of conversation around “giving people a seat at the table” or “passing the microphone”. You write about “playing games you can win” — can you explain what that means and why it’s important?
I used to try and influence existing structures, now I don’t care as much. At some point, all of the oppressors will die, and the next generation will have a chance to make a change. ‘Play games you can win’ is about focusing on different modes of being, not trying to force yourself into historical seats of power that will eventually change and phase out. I’m a big believer in self-preservation, and creating environments where I can thrive.
Take the venture capital model. That’s brilliant for getting businesses off the ground, when those businesses already have a repeatable formula for success. But a lot of founders who get VC funding come from a finance or consultancy background, so they know how to spend that money smartly. I came from an arts background, and I always said to my investors that I didn’t know how to do this. I needed more structure and support to take my creativity and add a massive dollop of consultant-style marking and growth planning. With those rogue bets, investors should acknowledge that more support is needed.
I remember speaking to male founders in the same investment portfolio as me, who were spending hundreds of thousands of pounds on social media advertising to grow their businesses, but whenever I suggested that for my business, investors told me I should just go and do some press or promotion instead. We have to ask: why do the public expect female founders to be visible? Why do female founders fulfil that demand? Why do investors push them to be brand ambassadors without paying them extra for it? And then why does the media love taking them down?
Equity is a big feature in the book, and you encourage readers to “ask for 50/50” but “take as much as you can get”. Why is equity such an important lever for change?
Equity will be critical for the next few generations of women, and will determine their hustle, their burnout and their energy — everything in their working lives. It can be financial, but it’s also really important to consider equity in domestic labour and childcare, which is the biggest factor in gender inequality. Having equity frees you up to make choices. That might be the choice to take a sabbatical or maternity leave, or just to work less.
Within companies, equity is often distributed differently if you’re in what might be considered a more feminine role like marketing or community, rather than what might be considered a more masculine role like engineering or finance. We’ve seen so many companies built on the ideas and creativity of women, but they are not owned by women, which means when the businesses are sold, the women involved don’t see the rewards or get the credit. There is also a trickle-down effect. I’ve seen so many women benefit enormously from equity in companies that have been acquired, who then become angel investors and reinvest that capital into other female founders.
Something quite unique about New Methods for Women is the emphasis on personal healing as a way to unlock potential, which is not something we typically hear business leaders talk about.
The way it’s been done before is a bit of a joke — the Silicon Valley founder who has a guru following him around or uses his son as a ‘blood boy’ to keep him young. It’s more like a boxer getting a quick massage and a splash of water at the side of the ring, just so he can get back in the fight again. The only one who talked about it in a way I understood was Ray Dalio — that’s who I learned about transcendental meditation from. I think healing is essential.
If I know that my traumas show up in certain behaviours at work, I have a choice between continuing to act on them or work through them to achieve what I want to achieve. Gen Z is the first generation who have a language to explain their feelings. The workplace will be a much richer place when people have space to bring their whole selves to work, and have the self-awareness to know why they might be acting a certain way.
How do you define success?
Early on, I read the book It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work by David Heinemeier Hansson and Jason Fried. At the time, it seemed like that craziness was part of the culture and aesthetic of entrepreneurship, but it’s not necessary.
Twice a year, I do a vision-setting exercise with The Stack World members, where I ask them to write a list of women they believe live life on their own terms. That’s a very different question to asking who they admire. That question has really shifted how I think about success. I aspire to fulfil my creative vision and make the right products at the right level for me at the time, rather than doing something young, getting loads of money for it, and burning out or burning away.
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