Sahar Hashemi

Why organisations work with Sahar Hashemi

• She has built three commercial ventures from a standing start. Coffee Republic (110 stores, £50 million market cap), Skinny Candy (acquired by Glisten Plc) and Buy Women Built (2,000+ businesses, £2.5 billion combined turnover) give her a working library of how entrepreneurial behaviour actually feels day to day.
• Her Start Up Forever framework breaks the entrepreneurial mindset down into a small set of repeatable daily behaviours, which is what lets it survive contact with corporate hierarchy. The book was named a Financial Times Business Book of the Month.
• She translates between two worlds that rarely speak the same language: founders running on instinct and customer obsession, and senior executives running on process and structure. Most speakers can describe one of those worlds; she has lived both.
• Her credibility on women-led growth is operating credibility, not advocacy. Buy Women Built is a commercial channel built with major retailers, and she co-chaired the UK government’s Scale Up Taskforce on growing SMEs.

Biography highlights

• Co-founder, Coffee Republic; scaled to 110 stores and a £50 million market capitalisation
• Founder, Skinny Candy (50% acquired by Glisten Plc) and Buy Women Built
• Author, Anyone Can Do It (Wiley, 2003) and Start Up Forever (Troubador, 2019, Financial Times Business Book of the Month)
• OBE for services to the UK economy and to charity, 2012 Birthday Honours
• Co-chair, UK government Scale Up Taskforce; board member, Scale Up Institute
• Young Global Leader, World Economic Forum

Biography

Coffee Republic opened on South Molton Street in 1995, the first US-style coffee bar chain in the UK. Within five years it ran 110 stores at a £50 million market capitalisation. Sahar Hashemi co-founded the business with her brother Bobby after leaving a career in law, and the speed of the build became the basis of everything she has worked on since.

The question that has occupied her for two decades is why large companies struggle to act on what they already know. Most have the people, the capital and the data to behave entrepreneurially. They rarely behave that way in practice. Her book Start Up Forever, named a Financial Times Business Book of the Month, breaks that gap into a set of daily habits that survive inside corporate structure rather than dying in workshop rooms.

The work has weight because it is grounded in three operating businesses she actually built, not consulting case studies. Skinny Candy, the sugar-free confectionery brand, was acquired by Glisten Plc. Buy Women Built, launched in 2020, now represents more than 2,000 women-built businesses with combined turnover above £2.5 billion and has become a working channel inside major UK retailers. She co-chaired the UK government’s Scale Up Taskforce and sits on the board of the Scale Up Institute.

Senior teams at Microsoft, L’Oreal, LinkedIn, Procter & Gamble and Sky have brought her in for the same reason: she gives a leadership group a usable answer to the question of what entrepreneurial behaviour looks like on a Tuesday afternoon at a 50,000-person company. She was awarded an OBE in 2012 for services to the UK economy and to charity, and named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum.

Key speaking topics

• Entrepreneurial mindset inside large organisations
• Innovation and creativity as everyday discipline
• Building start-up culture in established businesses
• Intrapreneurship and behaviour change at scale
• Women-led entrepreneurship and scale-up growth
• Customer obsession as a leadership behaviour
• Courage, action and the founder’s bias to start

Ideal for

• Executive teams running innovation, transformation or culture-change programmes
• CHROs and learning leaders who want behaviour change, not awareness
• Strategy and growth leaders trying to build new businesses inside an existing one
• Sales, marketing and customer teams rebuilding around customer obsession

Audience outcomes

• A practical model of entrepreneurial behaviour that translates into Monday-morning habits
• Specific examples of how founder instincts (customer obsession, bias to act, comfort with ambiguity) operate inside corporate structure
• A clearer view of why innovation programmes stall, and what to remove rather than add
• Renewed confidence in personal agency: what an individual contributor or senior leader can change without permission
• Frameworks from Start Up Forever that teams can apply to their own products, customers and decisions