International Women’s Day
Monday (8th March) marked one of the most important days of the year to celebrate the achievements of women, raise awareness about women’s equality, lobby for accelerated gender parity and fundraise for female-focused charities.; International Women’s Day.
This year’s theme was #choosetochallenge, and we thought Local Business Rocks would be a great place to host celebrating local business women that rock! A challenged world is an alert world, and from challenge comes change. So let’s all choose to challenge.
This year I want to help forge a gender-equal world by raising awareness of extraordinary LOCAL businesswomen, raising their profile, celebrating their achievements and captivating their career stories. If you can’t see it, you can’t be it, and I want EVERYONE to see and hear some fabulous female roles models on our doorstep. I want female leaders and entrepreneurs to be SEEN and HEARD on social media and in the press.
If you think careers go in straight lines, think again! Careers are not linear; they can sometimes be a series of adventures or experiments.
Celebrating Local Businesswomen
We have so many amazing local women in business, so Career Voyage and Local Business Rocks collaborated and had a Local Business Women Rock celebration, We got together and discussed career journeys, what brought us to where we are now, what we have achieved in the last year and who inspires us to succeed. You can see the full conversation below; but let’s introduce you first:
Sarah Taylor Phillips, Career Voyage
Sarah is the face of Career Voyage; a successful local businesswoman with a varied background in career development, coaching and talent acquisition, and brand marketing. Sarah’s career in FMCG brand marketing saw her work on huge brands such as Clover and Quorn. Sarah switched careers into HR, working in headhunting and then co-founding a hugely successful £5.5m annual turnover interim business locally working with national and global brands. As well as managing Career Voyage, Sarah also volunteers with a variety of local organisations to bridge the gap between education and business and connect the local community.
We will not go into too much depth about what Career Voyage offers both individuals and businesses, as you are already on this site. So when you have finished watching the video, have a look around.
Angharad Wrigley – Local Business Rocks and Hot Tubs Rock
Angharad has one of the most interesting career stories we have ever heard, starting in administration and now running a hugely successful hot tub business, stopping in retail and engineering along the way. If you missed hearing it before, then check it out here. Angharad’s career goes to show how random career progression and development can be. Your career is a voyage of discovery and one adventure leads to another! Angharad’s career journey is a great example of how random career moves can be but you can see common strands of her strengths showing themselves in each of her roles.
Angharad is also the founder of Local Business Rocks, a fantastic business membership community. Local Business Rocks provides local awareness, increases business visibility and offers support, training, networking and opportunities to collaborate with other businesses. She is passionate about supporting local businesses and helping them make great collaborations.
Helen Villiers – Liberation Therapy
Another local businesswoman, Helen. Helen is a highly experienced psychotherapist and the founder of Liberation Therapy, offering specialist support to individuals, companies and other therapists.
Helen is also the founder of the amazing Chepstow Covid19 Helping Group that has been integral in supporting the local community throughout the pandemic. Furthermore, watch the video to find out how Helen recently went viral!
Kelly Cornish – Heart Heroes
Kelly founded the awesome charity Heart Heroes in 2018 to support children with congenital heart conditions and their families. Her inspiration is personal as 25 years ago, Kelly’s cousin, Corina, died aged just 10 months, while surgeons attempted to fit a stent in her heart. She had been born with a congenital heart condition.
Kelly said: “I had just finished senior school, and I would go to see her every day at Bristol Children’s Hospital. It was all very traumatic for my aunt.”
As an adult, inspired by Corina, Kelly worked for a charity for young people with congenital heart disease. She soon realised there was little by way of support for parents of babies and small children.
So Heart Heroes was born. The charity continues to go from strength to strength, and to find out more about the fantastic work they do, please click here.
The Video
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Sarah started her career in fmcg marketing working as a brand manager on Clover and as an interim manager on Clover (twice) and Quorn. She founded a start-up interim management company in Gloucestershire and that business changed the percentage of women and diverse talent in senior marketing and HR roles. Sarah specialises in attracting, onboarding, developing, engaging and retaining diverse talent into forward thinking businesses to improve productivity, performance and profit. Flexible working and wellbeing play a large part. Since covid-19 wreaked havoc on the job landscape, Sarah has a created an innovative programme to get senior experienced professionals back into work or fine-tune their current role so that it makes happy.