"I didn’t know anybody who had a job.” This is not what I expected from an interview with a trailblazing business entrepreneur. However Debbie Wosskow — founder of the UK’s first women-only members club the AllBright — goes on to qualify this statement.
“I grew up in a very business-minded family, the very classic Jewish family in the sense that everybody ran their own businesses, whether that was my grandmother who had a chain of sweet shops and off-licences, or my mother who helped run a printing company; my father had his own law firm. So business was always something that was discussed around the dinner table, something that I was very familiar with.”
So a future where she ran her own business was always on the cards as she grew up in Sheffield and Leeds, and she didn’t feel that being female was a handicap. “I was surrounded by a lot of women who, as well as being entrepreneurs, were mothers and ran the family as well as running businesses. So that sets the tone for ‘normal’.”
She believes there should be more working women running business, doing what they want to do professionally and personally, and to help them achieve that she founded with Anna Jones, former CEO of Hearst magazines, the AllBright Club earlier this year, the UK’s first female-only members’ club for working women.
AllBright’s stated aim is to support and promote “the most-promising and innovative female entrepreneurs in Britain, connecting them with a community of angels and investors…making the UK the best place in the world to be a working woman.”
She tells me she started the club with “a hypothesis that women need to build a better network, they need to improve their skills and we need to find a way to address the challenges around confidence and resilience for women.”
The name was based on a quote from Madeline Albright (Wosskow added an extra ‘l’), the first female US Secretary of State: “There is a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women”.
I ask if Wosskow can credit her own success to the helping hands of other women?
“For me, my family life was a big inspiration in terms of my mother and grandmother— it shows what is possible,” she says, but I’m not sure that really answers the question.
Nor does her follow-up: “My sisterhood or ‘girl gang’ of amazing female friends and executives that I’ve built up over the years have been extremely valuable.” She adds that AllBright — which costs members £700 a year — is built on a strong core of a “genuine friendship” with Jones.
The price of membership may be steep, but in the era of #MeToo, #pregnantthenscrewed and increasing transparency (if not equality) of the gender pay gap, the need for it is clear. Wosskow says that the UK is “still not a great place to be a working woman.”
Last year “only two per cent of capital went to female CEOs,” she tells me, “and only one in six people in leadership positions in the corporate world are women. I’ve been at this for more than 20 years and there aren’t any more women out there than when we started.”
Wosskow’s business flair was first evident when she was 15 and set up a hair scrunchie business which earned her a national Young Enterprise award. But then she studied Philosophy and Theology at New College, Oxford. I wouldn’t have thought it was the obvious choice for a business career, but she says it was the perfect degree for her future plans.
“You have to be very logical as a philosopher. A lot of philosophers make quite shrewd business people so it’s not as a big leap as it sounds.”
She did end up getting a conventional job at a management consultancy firm straight after university, but soon left to launch her first business at the age of 25, in digital PR, taking advantage of the dot com “gold rush”.
“I wasn’t a very good management consultant,” she laughs, “but I was good at clients and working out how to put together things that would convince people to hire you.”
Her next business made her name, and her fortune. In 2011 Wosskow was on holiday with her two children Noah and Grace, now 9 and 7 at “an expensive hotel in the Caribbean”. Watching the Kate Winslet/Cameron Diaz film The Holiday on the flight home, she realised “that there were different holidays I could have had.” She would have preferred one that was more child-friendly, more flexible, and more relaxing for a young family. And so her business Love Home Swap was born.
Her target holiday-makers were women: 85% of the LHS customer base was female. She describes the business as a “community” — one which grew from 200 homes at launch in 2007 to over 250,000 home swappers when she sold the business for $40million last year. In 2016 she was awarded an OBE for her services to business.
She describes herself as very driven — and if building a business from scratch to $40million in five years doesn’t scream drive, then I don’t know what does — but it’s a full time job. “You have to be super gritty . It’s got to really float your boat to want to work all the time.”
And it does seem that she works all the time. There’s running AllBright, launching the second Allbright Club in Mayfair (with a third, in LA, on the way) and launching the new AllBright Academy, which is a free ten-week course for budding female business women who can makes use of the AllBright network, without the price tag.
She often talks about what she calls “the 3Gs”, and she brings them up now. They are graft (hard work), grace (“a lot of the time you can feel frustrated and I think grace under pressure is important”) and grit (“I think that’s just how some people are made”).
When I ask her how she juggles her life and kids with this full work schedule, she blanches.
“I’m certain you wouldn’t ask that of a guy.”
But didn’t she found AllBright to help women figure out the answer to questions like this?
“Everybody’s juggling their lives,” she concedes. “The trick for me is to wake up really early.” That’s 5.20am early. She also lives within walking distance of AllBright, in Little Venice, and involves her children in her work as much as possible. “The kids are in a lot — part of the balancing act is that they frequently come in for dinner; I’m doing my son’s birthday party in the club.”
So, in a way her children are getting a similar education in entrepreneurialism as their mum, although their home life is slightly different. While she grew up between “a very small [Jewish] community in Sheffield and Leeds which has a much bigger community”, Judaism is, she says “no longer part of my day to day life”.
I wonder if the hefty price tag for membership makes AllBright quite self-selecting? She says that the business is “a combination of profit and purpose”. However, she does accept that £700 is beyond many women’s reach and does not want her club to become just another bastion of exclusivity for the privileged.
“We want as many women as possible to sign up to the free academy. We think the quality of the cohort is incredibly high.”
For example, she mentions some names from her “girl gang” of friends, including Facebook’s Nicola Mendelsohn and Labour MP Luciana Berger who are both members of the faculty at the AllBright Academy.
You do get a lot of bang for your buck as a member; a safe space to network and bounce business ideas off other members and potential new partners, and a gym and beauty salon if you need to decompress or freshen up between meetings. There is also a restaurant and a nanny. The decor is light and bright and modern.
“I have to feel the part— it’s like armour and getting ready for battle.” However, she doesn’t have time to go shopping. “I love clothes but hate shopping— a lot of stuff goes back and forwards from Net a Porter,” she laughs. There’s no contradiction with this and feminism, she says, “it’s part of doing what you need to do.”
Like this? Sign up for more with our JC Life newsletter https://www.thejc.com/subscribe
From fabulous recipes, to parenting tips; travel and West End entertainment; insightful interviews and much more: there’s more to the JC than news
