Introduction to the New, New, News..

A note of news from our new Managing Director, Anne-Marie Twigge –

New beginnings..

It’s been a little over 60 days since I walked into quite the affair of an anniversary celebration. Our member Cathelijne Lania launched her company A Beautiful Story 15 years ago and decided to – rightly so – put it out there with a big bang of an event I will forever remember.

That same morning, on Wednesday the 1st of September, I walked into a brand-new workspace and began to think about the story I am looking to create with our longstanding community; The Next Women. “How am I going to evolve TNW and myself into the new role that I have taken on and empower our entrepreneurs?” is just one of the many but quite important thought that I pondered on.

It is thereby no coincidence that we paid attention to sparking joy in business in my first weeks at the helm. Curious to learn more about our members and what sparks them, the first thing I did was set up dedicated consultation hours every Wednesday and Friday morning. I spoke with over 37 members and onboarded 10 more. The scent of growth that ran through the conversations were both insightful and uplifting. I believe there is enough for the team I wish to grow and myself to do to get us all moving further – perhaps even beyond our own collective imaginations.

What sparks can we build to enhance our own beautiful story?

New encounters

For one it is to continue to actively meet and learn from each other, and in that help each other out. During the new introductions and new member acquaintances I have addressed the idea that building a community that thrives on giving. I introduced the “every member needs to give to gain” idea in the first kick-off we did with our founders in Beauty which you’ll read more about below.

Perhaps I can say that this sentiment was carried forward during the launch of our 3rd Fempower Your Growth programme which we commenced this month with our long standing partners ABN AMRO, Rabobank, ING Bank, Better Future, McKinsey and Invest International. The Next Women was also one of the first to host a physical Members Drinks at the newly refurbished Hotel de L’Europe in Amsterdam and added a spark of an art tour to the mix! Our Coaching Hours on growth were seriously overbooked and confirmed our believes that everyone is fully back in the saddle and ready to be even more serious about building and growing their businesses.

New ways of looking at exceptional leadership

The coming period we’ll be focussing on exceptional leadership and we are keen to learn what and who we believe to be exceptionally leading. Obviously we understand that role modelling is key in leadership and we’ll begin to warm ourselves up with profiles who are moving into the direction of The Next Women Top 100 and Women to Watch. But we also believe there are more attributes to being exceptionally leading than the single person!

We are looking for exceptional business models and tooling, companies that stand out in collective original thinking, industries that are shaping up to new forms, innovations that break the conventional ideas around growth, examples of success that surpass our current notions of originality.. if you have any contributions, please care to share here.

New experts who are building access and transparency with a digital roadmap

As it goes for sharing more news; we are super excited about the fact that we are going to be putting a lot more attention toward improving our digital landscape. We believe it to be pivotal to continuing our success and that by proxy of future proofing our community connectivity we should be intelligent about our platform – both in the physical and the virtual space. So you might see some changes here and there and with your help a few launches in the new year! We kicked the month off with a new team who are dedicated to learn, design and build in bi-weekly sprints. I am seriously excited about this and look forward to giving you more insights as we progress.

To be absolutely honest, I could go on and on about all things new, but I am also extremely proud to continue this beautiful story with a community that has brought about such a strong precedent in women entrepreneurship. I have been in awe of the exceptional leading ladies that are part of our history and I cant wait to meet the next women who will spark our future.

Warmest regards and on to the next month filled with adventure!

Launching the 3rd Edition of Fempower Your Growth

This month, with 60 entrepreneurs and 30 bankers excited to make an impact in business, Annemarie de Jong – CEO of Better Future and our programme facilitator – kicked off the third edition of Fempower your Growth. This year we have launched the programme with a couple of new gems. For one we are interested in new ways of looking at growth, and we do so by meeting in new settings with a serious collection of new speakers. Our settings will alternate between the physical and the virtual and enable us to add even more entrepreneurs from across the Netherlands.

The programme also boasts a new set of partners as we welcome McKinsey to the mix with them facilitating master classes on strategy and staffing. I am delighted with our banking partners, ABN AMRO, ING Bank, Rabobank and Invest International who have dedicated themselves again to providing our participants with a very comprehensive set of possibilities where it comes to financing with Rabobank doing an outstanding job as our 2021 programme host.

New this year is also our programme lead and community super glue Mirjam who teamed with all the busy bees across the partners in building an even better experience for everyone. Curious to know more about this programme? Find out more by clicking the button below.

More about Fempower Your Growth

De Groei Tafel in Limburg

New and an addition in our Growth programming is De Groei Tafel. Launching on November 9th is a new programme developed with our partners LIOF, LEF, Brightlands Venture Partners, Rabobank and Borski Fund.

This event is especially designed for Women Entrepreneurs who wish to explore growth opportunities and discuss these with experts who have extensive knowledge in driving companies forward and a network to prove it.

Here are a number of questions you could have that we would love to help you get answers to:

◊   What skill and USP’s are you using and are you getting the most out of them?
◊   You see opportunities for growth but have questions about how to go about your ideas and putting them into practice?
◊   Are you thinking about your financials and looking for ways to increase your room to finance new ideas and initiative
◊   You have (re-)developed your business plan and are looking to meet with experts who can provide you with feedback
◊   You have a pitch deck and are looking for investors

Would you like to meet with a fresh pair of eyes who is eager to explore your plans – then this is the event for you. The result: a pack filled with new insights and opportunities plus a number of new experts and entrepreneurs to add to your network.

This event is held in Panheel – Limburg

You can still sign up for the event via the button below.

Sign up for De Groei Tafel

Beauty and The Brains - Founders meet at De Bijenkorf

As we look for new ways that empower our entrepreneurs we also look at who can join us in providing a platform for women to excel at their business. We quickly realised that quite a number of our members are vendors for De Bijenkorf and were excited as much as they were when we were able to onboard them as our first partner and host for the Founder Focus groups. This group kicked off with an introduction and will be meeting each other frequently over the course of the coming 12 months. The next meeting planned in two to three weeks.

The Founder Focus Club is one of our programmes that we look to improve even further with more partners in the coming months. If you are interested in becoming a partner for our Founder Focus please connect directly with Anne-Marie.