The experience behind the work.
I started a business at my kitchen table with my sister, £100,000 of our own savings, and a genuine belief we could build something significant.
We did, in many ways. Upper Street became a real company – venture-backed, press-covered, loved by its customers. We raised over £2 million in investment across multiple rounds, including two crowdfunding campaigns. At our peak, we had a team, a retail space in central London, and ambitions to take the brand to the US.
And then we ran out of runway.
I called the board meeting myself. We sat round the table – investors, my sister on video call from Hong Kong, and me – and we took the decision to close the business and go into administration. It was one of the hardest things I've done. It was also, as it turned out, where everything that followed began.
Within a month, I set up Enter The Arena.
I'd just lived through every mistake a founder can make in fundraising – the wrong investors, the gender bias, the fatal assumption that a lead investor would keep following their money. I understood the system from the inside, in a way you only can when it's your own money and your own team on the line.
I spent the next several years working with female founders navigating investment. That work – the coaching, the book, the podcast, the programmes – was grounded in lived experience and built around one conviction: that female founders are a great bet, and the system just hasn't caught up yet.
But the work took me somewhere I didn't fully anticipate.
The more time I spent with founders, the more I saw that the fundraising challenges were rarely just about fundraising. They were about governance. About board dynamics that weren't working. About the particular kind of pressure that scaling puts on a founder's judgement and leadership. About decisions that were genuinely hard to make from inside the noise.
So the work evolved. Over the last few years I've moved into board chairing and senior strategic advisory – working with founders at the level where the real complexity lives. I chair boards, serve as a non-executive director, and work as a thinking partner to founders who are navigating growth, investment, and the kind of leadership challenges that don't come with an instruction manual.
The founder experience is still the foundation. It's just that now I bring it to a different seat at the table.
Some of what I've learned in this work isn't in any framework.
Most founders don't lack intelligence or ambition. They lack someone who'll be honest with them. The people around them are often too close, too invested, or too cautious to say the difficult thing. That gap is expensive.
Boards can be transformative or toxic, and the difference is rarely about structure. It's about dynamics, trust, and whether the chair is willing to hold things that are uncomfortable.
Scaling does something particular to founders. It narrows vision, accelerates decision-making in the wrong direction, and makes it harder to hear your own thinking. The most useful thing I can often do is slow that down.
And the founders who do this best aren't the ones who have it all figured out. They're the ones who've built the right conditions to keep thinking clearly – even when it's hard.
I work with a small number of founders and boards at any one time.
That's a deliberate choice. This kind of work only functions on the basis of real trust and genuine understanding – and that takes time and attention. I tend to build long relationships with the people I work with. That's not accidental. It's the point.
My approach is deliberately non-prescriptive. I'm not here to give you my answers or to become someone you depend on. Good advisory work should make you think more clearly for yourself – sharpen your judgement, strengthen your confidence, help you trust your own read on things.
Much of my career has been spent working with female founders – and that experience shapes everything I do.
The challenges female founders face – in raising investment, in being taken seriously in the boardroom, in scaling businesses while carrying pressures that often don't get named – are not abstract to me. I've lived some of them. I've watched others navigate them up close. I wrote a book about them.
That understanding informs how I work with every founder I sit alongside, regardless of who they are.
I founded and scaled Upper Street, a venture-backed fashion tech business. Before that, I was part of the early team at UpMyStreet.com, one of the UK's early internet pioneers, later sold to Zoopla.
Since then I've chaired boards, served as a non-executive director, and advised hundreds of founders through growth, investment and leadership challenges. I'm the author of RAISE: The Female Founder's Guide to Securing Investment. I write about leadership, strategy and scaling in my newsletter, Female Founders Fly – femalefoundersfly.substack.com – and I'm a longstanding judge at the Great British Entrepreneur Awards.
I founded Enter The Arena in 2016 – a coaching and advisory business that grew out of my own fundraising experience and has since supported over 1,400 female founders. The work you'll find here reflects how my practice has evolved since then.
"As a busy founder, I appreciated the time and space to build a strategy for my board. Julia helped me see what was missing, formalise what I had, and bring clarity to the process."
"Julia is smart, savvy, thoughtful, and calm. She brings a wealth of insights from across sectors, helping me navigate tough situations with confidence. She always gets to the heart of the issue, with no-nonsense wisdom and unwavering support."
“When I brought Julia in as Chair, Feldspar was an early-stage, innovative, fast-moving company navigating our first capital raise. As we prepared for the next stage of growth, Julia helped me build a board and governance structure that brought greater rigour to our decision-making and strengthened how we operated as a business. She strengthened our financial oversight, introduced more structured decision-making around the strategic paths available to the business, and helped shape board meetings that drove meaningful decisions rather than just reporting progress.
What I valued most was her understanding of the pressures and responsibilities that come with leading a growing company. Julia was always available as a sounding board and brought a level of challenge and rigour that consistently pushed me to think more clearly, sharpen my judgement, and make better decisions.
A year of that kind of support helped build a stronger foundation for the company and put in place the governance and leadership structures that continue to support Feldspar's growth today.”
If you're wondering whether this is the right kind of support for where you are – let's have a conversation.
There's no formula for what I do. But there's usually a fairly quick sense of whether it's a fit.