“Use your voice. If you are in the room, you are in the room for a reason.” Says Martha Lane Fox

Martha Lane Fox is a champion for tech and has been recognised as the most influential woman in digital in the past 25 years.

She was the co-founder of lastminute.com at the dawn of the dot-com era, growing the business to be one of the leading e-commerce brands in Europe.  

The 50-year-old trailblazer for women in tech has helped to shape public service digital projects,  and has experience sitting on the boards of Chanel, Donmar, Twitter and Warehouse. She is also a trustee of The Queen’s Commonwealth Trust. After entering the House of Lords on 26th March 2013, she became the youngest female member in history. Since then, she has been instrumental in helping to set up the Government Digital Service and GOV.UK. 

She is also chairwoman of fellow B Corp, WeTransfer, the Dutch-based firm focused on tools for creative businesses and is President of British Chambers of Commerce.

We interviewed her during B Corp month and Women's History Month to get her take on how businesses can embrace sustainable and inclusive growth and how individuals can succeed in business. 

The British Chambers of Commerce (BCC) has recently launched a three year gender equity campaign and has worked with leading panel provider Find Out Now to conduct a landmark survey of more than 4,100 respondents. The research found that two thirds of women feel they have missed out on career progression because of childcare responsibilities.  They also found that more than eight in ten (86%) women disagree that there is sufficient support for people with caring responsibilities for elderly or disabled relatives or friends and almost half (43%) of women feel they will miss out on career opportunities as a result of menopause.

How did you first become interested in business?

Both my parents are quite entrepreneurial - my mum started a business with her best friend when I was young and my Dad published his own gardening books. All around me was an amalgamation of interesting kinds of businesses and entrepreneurialism was strong. I think that's probably when I got the bug. My first job was in a small strategy consulting company called Spectrum. And it was there that I really learned about business in a more structured and professional way. It was really interesting because I worked with companies affected by the internet and media and telecoms. That was all in the early 90s. Everything was just exploding and it was here that I met my business partner Brent Hoberman who I went on to found lastminute.com with. 

As a successful woman in business, what advice would you give other women at the start of their career?

Use your voice. If you are in the room, you are in the room for a reason. Don't feel intimidated. Don't get that terrible impostor syndrome. Don't feel scared to have a point of view. Even if something comes out of your mouth and you think, what was that? It doesn't matter. Just keep going. I think women, especially younger women can sometimes feel a bit more on the backfoot and somehow feel because they've got to somewhere they shouldn't actually be there. 

There's something really important about how we help bring people's voices out in the right way and recognise people's contribution. 

How do you think businesses can better embrace equity?

Firstly, you have to be hyper aware and self-conscious about it. So, if I’m in a meeting and looking around thinking everyone looks a bit like me, then stop and plan how to bring in some people that are not all coming from the same point of view, or perspective. That's the first thing. Are you actually building a company, a team, getting views from your customers from a broad spectrum of different places? That’s really important. You have to look at every bit of your business and work out whether you're appealing to a broad group of people, and that might involve writing words, or it might involve going into different communities, or it might involve reorganising teams. There’s not one single silver bullet.

What challenges have you faced as an entrepreneur and how did you overcome them?

When we were just starting up lastminute.com, it was chaos. It was a startup; we didn't know what we were doing. A lot of the time, we were building technology that was completely new. We were trying to convince suppliers in the airline and the hotel business world to give products to young people. I had no track record in the travel industry. It was absolute mayhem, and everything went wrong all the time. The technology kept messing up, we made bad hires, we took our company public, and then a week later, the stock market blew up. It was a constant challenge. But I think that's the thing about building your own business, you have to keep moving, and you have to learn from the things that go wrong. And just try not to repeat them again. 

As a Chair of a B Corp company, why do you think the B Corp movement Is important for business?

Firstly, it makes good business sense. The movement is about showing to the world your credentials across a set of metrics that are going to help you do better business, because it's important to customers and important to potential employees. 

The second thing is, in this age where we're all competing for talent, every business needs digital skills right now. We know that the younger workforce wants to see that companies have signed up to a value system that is important to them around the climate and around sustainable and diverse goals. B Corp is a really clear way of signalling that. 

As President of the BCC, how important do you think the Chamber community is for business?

It’s incredibly important for businesses. Until I became President I don’t think I fully understood the incredible network effects that happen when you're part of the BCC network. 

To give an example, currently around 10% of businesses export in the UK, but if you’re a member of the BCC network it’s over 60%. To me, it shows that when you're part of the network, you see how things are done, you make connections and things that perhaps before seemed complicated, bureaucratic, or remote, become easier. 

At the moment, a lot of businesses are staring into a lot of ambiguity and have a very unclear idea about what’s happening with the economy. I think that's what I've been so amazed by with the BCC at this moment in time. These kinds of organisations really matter because government needs to hear those collective voices consistently and strongly. If you’re a small business or medium business, being able to link right up the chain to have part of that collective voice is really powerful.