The Cazenove Capital Female Founder of the Year Award
This award celebrates the economic contribution of female founders, from high potential start-ups and scale-ups to established businesses, who have delivered on their vision and plan, proven a new business model, or have a track record of successfully scaling one or several businesses.
The number of female-founded businesses has increased by 45% in the last decade to 1.58m. According to the Scale-Up Institute’s 2025 Annual Report, 144 female-led or co-founded SuperScalers with revenues above £50m collectively generated £22.5bn in sales and employed over 128,000 people.
Focusing on the personal contribution of a dynamic female leader, this Award recognises an enterprising individual who has achieved sustained growth and strong financial performance by building an engaged and productive team with a culture of innovation and resilience, effective management and inspirational leadership.
Judges will recognise those who have demonstrated:
• Visionary and inspirational leadership
• Identification of an untapped market opportunity
• Optimisation of talent and technology
• Strong commercial performance, financial results and profitable growth
• Creation of shareholder & stakeholder value
• Potential and plan for sustained growth
• Innovation in products, services or processes
• Customer engagement, loyalty & growth
• An ethical approach and profit with purpose
SCORING
In this category judges will compare the extent to which each candidate has demonstrated excellence in the following areas
Employee & Customer Engagement 20%
- How have you attracted, retained, motivated and optimised your team to help you win or retain clients?
- What talent strategies, workforce models or initiatives have improved employee engagement, increased productivity and enabled you to achieve your growth objectives?
- Provide case study examples and top line data to demonstrate how you have increased your customer base or market penetration over the last 18 months.
Leadership & Innovation 30%
- Evidence of how you created an innovation culture, proved the business model for your idea, or successfully scaled an innovative product, solution or service.
- How has your leadership philosophy or management structure driven growth or supported scale?
- How have you optimised new technology, platforms or processes to improve customer service or productivity?
Financial Performance & Growth 30%
- Describe the market opportunity you identified and your point of competitive differentiation.
- Explain your key growth metrics, including financial targets, KPIs, timescales and overall ambitions plus examples of milestones and barriers/challenges that have been overcome.
- Briefly outline your personal story including your career to date, successes and failures, leadership qualities, how you seek to inspire others and how this has benefited your existing business.
- How has your company performed against your growth plan and what will help you to sustain future growth?
- Show examples and/or case studies of what has supported, or will drive further, commercial success.
Purpose Beyond Profit 20%
- How has the founder’s guiding mission, values or purpose aligned with growth objectives?
- What is your company doing to improve environmental, social or governance impact and how are these initiatives aligned with commercial success?
- How does your approach to diversity, equity and inclusion align purpose with profit and how has this differentiated your business or made you more competitive?
