Fran Boorman is a bestselling author and successful entrepreneur having built a £9m turnover business around her two young children, which became the fastest growing in its sector. She has gone on to support over 1000 individuals start their own enterprises and become a key spokesperson for Social Enterprises and SMEs in the UK; representing their interests in government, as a TEDx speaker and as a regular contributor on BBC Radio. Fran is currently the CEO and Co-Founder of a ground-breaking new Social Enterprise called Goal 17. The company aims to assist in ending youth homelessness through the power of football. Having formed partnerships with many Premier League Football clubs and some of the largest and most respected UK companies, Goal 17 is expected to become the blue print for how business can profitably engage in making positive social impact. Fran is also a big advocate of supporting other women into enterprise and senior corporate roles. Fran speaks frequently on this topic in school and for clients such as Barclays and the Federation of Small Business. Alongside being entrepreneurial, she believes in leading by example in the corporate world and hold a Non-Executive Directorship in a large private hospitality company.
What does being a thriving entrepreneur mean to you?
“I Suppose the first thing people think about is money and money is important, money whether you like it or not really does make the world go round. So money is important but that wouldn’t make you thrive. I think to thrive got to be about being comfortable in who you are, feeling like you are achieving and you are progressing…”
More About Fran Boorman:
Other Quotes From the Chat with Fran Boorman:
- “the one thing that seems to tie together everything on my entrepreneurial journey is having a socially positive purpose to my business. So when I looked back at what I had done over the years I started to realise everything I’d done was all about driving positive social change through business and using that to create a better, stronger, more sustainable and profitable business”
- “once you find the right social purpose, or it could be an environmental purpose, but the right purpose you will know you have found it because you just want to work all of the time — it can be slightly unhealthy Neil because you end up having such a passion for it you want to work for it all the time”
- “I love working with small business owners, entrepreneurs because they have got that fire in their belly, that passion, because they found something that’s greater than themselves”
- “what makes an entrepreneur an entrepreneur, is not necessarily the fact that they run their own business it’s the fact that they are willing to step away from the crowd and find solutions to things that other people would just otherwise take for granted”
- “we always have to start by leading ourselves first before we try and lead others”
- “we are now competing in a global economy and the individual person and individual entrepreneur has more power than they’ve ever had before because they have the same tools in their hand as the big companies. Now that means there is a huge raft of opportunity for us but it also means that we are now competing in a global market. So any entrepreneur out there trying to build a business you can’t just do the same as you always done and you’ve got to find ways to stand out in a noisy market, and yes there are all sorts of clever social media techniques and those kind of things but if you look at what’s driving and if you look at the research, and in connection marketing go into a lot of the research behind what’s driving younger generations, millennial’s, what’s driving even the older generations and how they are shifting to see the world… People are looking for something with more meaning, people are looking to belong more than they ever have before. Again going back to what I said before we are more connected but we are more lonely than we have ever been. And that’s manifesting it’s way in the world that people are purchasing from companies, the way people are engaging in companies, the way start getting these super fans for brands. And we need to understand that in order to build our own successful businesses to stand out. Are not only attracting the loyal customers also the best talent, the people that want to work with us, the best partnerships making sure that we are attracting people to us rather than constantly shouting out sales messages that used to work in the past but now just seem to repel people”
- “business for good is good for business”
- “I now measure everything on whether it gives back, it grows economy and it connects people”
- “speaking on stage is not a manifestation of being an extrovert is actually just a skill that you’ve learned and it’s how you feel around it and how you manage those emotions”
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