Sahar Hashemi OBE

Why organisations work with Sahar Hashemi

• She has built three businesses from a standing start: Coffee Republic (100+ bars, £30 million annual sales, London-listed), Skinny Candy (sold to Glisten Plc) and Buy Women Built (2,000+ brands, £2.5 billion combined turnover). Each began with a problem she had as a customer, which is the mechanism she asks corporate teams to copy.
• Her work runs on three ideas taken directly from building Coffee Republic: see everything through the customer’s eyes, the value of being clueless, and leap and the net will appear. They are what the keynote is built on.
• Start Up Forever, a Financial Times Business Book of the Month, breaks entrepreneurial behaviour into a small set of daily habits that hold up inside hierarchy. She has tested them inside more than 500 organisations, among them Microsoft, Unilever, Goldman Sachs and LVMH.
• She has run the same company on both sides of the transition. Coffee Republic went from kitchen table to London listing in under six years, and she stepped back in 2001 on the view that it now needed managers instead of founders. That decision is the subject she has worked on ever since.
• Her credibility on women-led growth is commercial rather than advocacy. Buy Women Built runs through Tesco, Ocado, Whole Foods and QVC, and she co-chaired the UK Government Scale Up Taskforce in 2017.

Biography highlights

• Co-founder, Coffee Republic; grew to more than 100 bars with £30 million annual sales and a London Stock Exchange listing
• Founder, Skinny Candy, sold to Glisten Plc in 2007; co-founder, Buy Women Built
• Author of three books: Anyone Can Do It (Capstone, 2003), translated into six languages; Switched On (Capstone, 2010); and Start Up Forever (Troubador, 2019), a Financial Times Business Book of the Month
• OBE for services to the economy and to charity, 2012; Young Global Leader, World Economic Forum; Director magazine Top 10 Original Thinkers, 2011
• Co-chair, UK Government Scale Up Taskforce, 2017; Non-Executive Director, ScaleUp Institute, since 2018; member, Secretary of State’s Entrepreneurs Forum
• Buy Women Built represents more than 2,000 women-built brands with over £2.5 billion combined turnover, with partnerships at Tesco, Ocado, Whole Foods and QVC

Biography

Coffee Republic opened on South Molton Street in 1995, the first US-style coffee bar chain in the UK. Neither founder had worked in the industry. Sahar Hashemi was a solicitor. She came back from New York wanting a coffee she could not buy at home, so she and her brother Bobby built it themselves.

By 2001 the business had more than 100 bars, annual sales of £30 million and a London Stock Exchange listing. The Financial Times named it one of the brands that defined New Britain. Hashemi and her brother stepped back that year, on the view that the company now needed professional managers rather than entrepreneurs. The consequences of that judgement became her subject.

The question she has worked on since is why organisations with every advantage still struggle to act. She first put the answer in print in 2010, in Switched On, which set out eight habits for behaving entrepreneurially inside a large company. Start Up Forever followed nine years later, written after speaking inside hundreds of companies. Named a Financial Times Business Book of the Month, it argues that entrepreneurial behaviour does not disappear as a company grows. It gets buried under process and distance from the customer. Her remedy is subtraction: clear the obstacles and the behaviour comes back on its own. She has now worked inside more than 500 organisations, among them Microsoft, Unilever, Goldman Sachs, Deloitte and Skyscanner.

Two more businesses followed the same pattern. Skinny Candy, the sugar-free confectionery brand, sold to Glisten Plc in 2007. Buy Women Built, started during the pandemic, now represents more than 2,000 women-built brands with combined turnover above £2.5 billion. Its mark runs through Tesco, Whole Foods, QVC and Ocado, where the women-built aisle was the first at a major UK supermarket. She was awarded an OBE in 2012, co-chaired the UK Government Scale Up Taskforce in 2017, and has been a non-executive director of the ScaleUp Institute since 2018.

Key speaking topics

• Entrepreneurial behaviour inside large organisations
• Innovation and creativity as everyday discipline
• Start-up culture in established businesses
• Customer closeness as a leadership behaviour
• Human instinct and judgement in the age of AI
• Women-led entrepreneurship and the female advantage
• Intrapreneurship and behaviour change at scale

Ideal for

• Executive teams running innovation, transformation or culture-change programmes
• CHROs and learning leaders who want behaviour change rather than awareness
• Strategy and growth leaders building new businesses inside an existing one
• Sales, marketing and customer teams rebuilding around customer closeness

Audience outcomes

• A set of daily behaviours they can start on Monday without asking permission
• Specific examples of how founder instincts work inside corporate structure: closeness to the customer, and a bias to act before the information is complete
• A clearer view of why innovation programmes stall, and what to remove rather than add
• The habits from Start Up Forever applied to their own products, customers and decisions