New website helps women make things happen (From thisisoxfordshire)

New website helps women make things happen

3:24pm Thursday 18th June 2009 in

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ACCORDING to mother-of-one Cally Robson, there’s an army of women sat round kitchen tables dreaming up top-notch ideas ripe for successful development.

But because women have a-thousand-and-one other priorities in their lives, they often have no idea how to take these ideas to fruition, no one to turn to for help and no confidence to make it happen.

So Cally, 45, of Cornbury Park, Charlbury, has set up a web-based service to give them the leg-up they need.

She said: “Men have garden sheds and women have kitchen tables. They come up with ideas but very different ones to men.

“Almost half the women I’ve met have a good idea, but they think if it really was any good it would’ve been done before, or that they’re not qualified to take it forward.

“On both counts, when they start to look at what it would take they realise they could do it.

“Many just don’t have any confidence. What they need to be shown is that just because they don’t know something shouldn’t stop them moving forward. Particularly after you become a mum, when you’re always so scrambled with things to do, it’s difficult to get your head straight. Thinking anything through clearly is very difficult.”

After training as a chartered accountant herself, Cally dabbled as a book editor and dipped her toe into product development and the 90s dotcom bubble, before finally moving to Oxfordshire, becoming a “work-at-home” mum training as a life coach and designing her own range of crockery.

She came up with She’s Ingenious (or shesingenious.org) after pinpointing the need for specialist help for female would-be entrepreneurs.

According to Cally, who has husband Russell and five-year-old daughter, Edie, women’s ideas usually stem from their own life-styles – simple solutions to everyday problems.

And she has helped many with health and beauty businesses, family-based products and educational aids.

She said: “Because I’ve been coaching people with their ideas since 2003, what I was aware of was that women are often committed to other things.

“They didn’t have the flexibility to go off to networking dos, and they always have to watch the clock.

“I saw what they needed was a raft of information at a central point on the Internet, as well as one-to-one mentoring.”

Her website offers ladies a network of like-minded sisters to help answer questions they have and hurdles they come up against on their path to possible success.

Cally also offers one-to-one mentoring to members, who pay a small fee to join the site. Finally, the business publishes articles by well-known female entrepreneurs, such as ex BBC2 Dragon’s Den participant Rachel Elnaugh.

Almost 100 have already signed-up as fully-fledged members, while another 1,000 have contacted the site, which was officially launched on Thursday at the British Library’s Business and Intellectual Property Centre, in London.

Cally said: “In this country, we seem to take it for granted that mums are superwomen, and if you don’t live up to that, it’s easy to feel like a failure.

“When I start working with women, it doesn’t take long to start bringing that confidence back.”