Sahar Hashemi OBE — Keynote Speaker on the Entrepreneurial Mindset
SAHAR HASHEMI
Organizations don't lose innovation. They lose entrepreneurial behavior.
What if entrepreneurship wasn't about entrepreneurs at all?
Why do creativity, resourcefulness and customer closeness come so naturally to startups, while larger organisations have to write those values on the wall?
Having lived every stage of that journey from corporate lawyer, to founding Coffee Republic, to watching it evolve from startup to corporate, to working with thousands of founders and over 500 organisations, Sahar realised that entrepreneurial behaviour doesn't vanish in large companies.
It gets buried alive.
Systems replace instinct. Process replaces action. Sophisticated language replaces the simple questions that came naturally when you were close enough to see the customer's problem for yourself.
She believes we've got it back to front. Instead of trying to change how people think, we should clear away what gets in the way so people can feel it again. And when they feel it, they can't not act.
LEAP and the NET will appear
Entrepreneur · Bestselling author · Champion of female founded businesses
THE FIRST LEAP
On a trip to New York, Sahar, a lawyer, falls in love with the skinny lattes in the new-style coffee bars. When she can't find anything similar back home, she solves her own problem as a customer by creating it herself. Together with her brother Bobby, despite having no industry experience between them, they build Coffee Republic, one of the UK's first coffee bar chains, helping turn a nation of tea drinkers into coffee. It marks the beginning of three ideas that still define her work today: see everything through the customer's eyes, the importance of being clueless, and leap and the net will appear.
A DEFINING BRAND OF NEW BRITAIN
Coffee Republic grows to over 100 bars, floats on the London Stock Exchange and reaches annual sales of £30 million. The Financial Times names it one of the brands that defined "New Britain". Believing the business now needed professional managers rather than entrepreneurs, Sahar and her brother step back. It is a decision that would shape her thinking for years to come.
ANYONE CAN DO IT
After leaving Coffee Republic, Sahar writes Anyone Can Do It, telling the unlikely story of how a lawyer and an investment banker with no industry experience built a coffee chain from their mother's kitchen table simply because they wanted it as customers. More than a memoir, the book captures the practical behaviours behind starting a business, challenging the myth that entrepreneurs are born with a special personality or talent. It becomes one of the UK's bestselling books on entrepreneurship, second only to Richard Branson, is translated into six languages, and inspires a generation of future entrepreneurs.
SKINNY CANDY
Wanting sugar-free sweets that didn't feel like a compromise, Sahar launches Skinny Candy, helping bring the category into the mainstream. Two years later, the business is acquired by confectionery company Glisten PLC. It is the second business she has built by solving a problem she experienced herself as a customer.
RECOGNITION AND PUBLIC SERVICE
Sahar is recognised as a Pioneer to the Life of the Nation by Queen Elizabeth II, and awarded an OBE for services to the economy and to charity. A Young Global Leader at the World Economic Forum, she joins the Secretary of State's Entrepreneurs Forum and in 2017 co-chairs the UK Government Scale Up Taskforce with the Business Minister.
START UP FOREVER
Having spoken inside over 400 organisations, Sahar keeps hearing the same question: how does a large organisation get entrepreneurial behaviour back? Most people assume it can't, that agility and boldness are things a company grows out of as it scales. Start Up Forever argues the opposite. Those behaviours don't disappear, they get buried under complexity and distance from customers, and the way to get them back is to remove what is in the way. The prize is a big organisation that still moves like a small one. The book is named a Financial Times Book of the Month.
BUY WOMEN BUILT
During the pandemic, Sahar reads a tweet: "Not all of us can invest in women. Not all of us can mentor women. But we can all buy from them." Women in the UK start businesses at around half the rate of men, a gap estimated to be worth £250 billion to the economy. While most of the conversation focuses on the gaps and on what's missing for women, Sahar decides to start a movement that points to what already exists: the thousands of brands built by women that shoppers buy every day without knowing it. It begins as a WhatsApp group of a few founders she knows. It becomes Buy Women Built, a consumer movement making women-built brands visible.
A NATIONAL MOVEMENT
Four years later, Buy Women Built has become a national commercial movement, representing more than 2,000 women-built brands generating over £2.5 billion in turnover. The Buy Women Built mark appears on thousands of products, while partnerships with Tesco, Whole Foods, Holland & Barratt, QVC, Manchester City and more have helped make women-built brands visible to millions of consumers, including through the world's first women-built aisle on Ocado.
Keynote Talks
Speaking
Engagements
Three times, Sahar spotted a customer problem and built a business around it. She's spent the last 25 years understanding why entrepreneurial behaviour fades as organisations grow, and how to bring it back.
Most organisations don't have a creativity problem. They struggle to make things happen. People hesitate. Bold decisions stall. Change gets resisted, not because anyone lacks courage, but because complexity, busyness and perfectionism have quietly buried the instinct to act.
Sahar takes audiences back to the one thing everything starts with: the customer. When you reconnect with the customer, you can't not act.
Sahar takes a limited number of speaking engagements each year.
Speaker Enquiries →
By far the most engaging and credible keynote speaker we have had over the years.
CEO of Campari
You were absolutely phenomenal.
Goldman Sachs
Your talk was the best part of the day.
LINKEDIN TALENT CONFERENCE
You were mind blowingly marvelous.
INNOTOWN Norway
The story about her trip to New York and subsequent cravings for skinny lattes is the stuff of coffee shop legend.
The Sunday Times Business — 'How I Made It'
Sahar was the best-ranked speaker at our conference and did an amazing session.
Andrew Buckingham, Vice President, The Coca-Cola Company Middle East
We have seen a lot of speakers over the years, and we really thought Sahar was excellent. A great storyteller, clear messaging and sign posting — she really worked hard to bring in the Bupa context.
BUPA
Sahar has been great at landing some important messages within our organisation, balancing her experience and the reality of our company. I could hear people across the week referring back to Sahar's speech and key messages.
Sanofi
You gave us some hints and tips to help us cope with some of the entrepreneurial stereotypes — really interesting and useful. I heard many of these quoted back by our guests after the event.
Tim O'Brien, Director, Willmott Dixon
Ratings from attendees concluded that 95% felt that Sahar provided insights on how to shift to an entrepreneurial mindset.
Bank of America
What a fabulous talk — the team were on fire afterwards.
Richard Saynor, CEO, Sandoz
Sahar was excellent and definitely stole the show. Her story was so raw, inspiring, relatable, back to basics and resonated a lot with our audience.
Deloitte
Your story is so inspiring, yet your mindset shifts are so practical. Participants left the session clearer on what an entrepreneurial mindset is and how they can further adopt it.
Megan Donaldson, Director, Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan
Thank you for an amazing session for our flagship programme.
You were a real hit with the audience. Your keynote had delegates talking about it all day and evening — and after the event — it was good for them to reframe and refocus those key topics of customer and innovation in their minds.
Katy Hamid, Head of Employee Communications, Barratt Redrow plc
Sahar hit the nail on the head in terms of content and relevance.
TRAVELEX
Sahar went down an absolute storm.
THOMSONS ONLINE BENEFITS
Great presentation from Sahar at our Sandoz Leaders meeting today. I loved the customer focus and the idea that we need to understand our customers and walk in their shoes to create an entrepreneurial and enterprise mindset. We so often assume we understand our customers rather than taking the time to listen to them.
Timothy de Gavre, VP and CCO, Sandoz