Leadership pilot for female founders under scaling pressure
Business psychologist and executive coach Charlotte Dixon is launching a UK-wide leadership pilot for female founders who are scaling their businesses. Five founders will each receive two free one-to-one sessions to help them navigate leadership challenges, make confident decisions, and manage difficult conversations with their teams and investors as they go through change.
The online coaching sessions, usually worth £1,100, will support founders to face their biggest challenges head-on, helping them to identify factors impacting their resilience and enable stronger decision-making during periods of growth and change.
The pilot is designed for founders who have raised investment or have an established revenue stream, and who lead a team of ten or more. At this stage, on top of investor expectations, founders are often under intense pressure to manage a new layer of leadership and the difficult conversations that come with it. The sessions are designed with these pressures in mind and can be used to support founders through co-founder tension, investor milestones, significant change, preparing for a merger, or a new funding round. Charlotte will ask each founder for honest feedback, including a short video about their experience. This will shape her work with investors to develop sustainable support through the harder stretches of scaling.
Charlotte is often brought in to support businesses in times of crisis or when pressure is high. She runs sessions for founders on scale-up and accelerator programmes and works with leaders in large organisations, from investment management to government. Her psychology background allows her to bring evidence-based tools into session, helping founders manage stress and decision fatigue. She also supports leaders when relationships become difficult, whether with a co-founder, the board, or the wider team.
A survey of 885 venture capitalists found that more than half see the management team as the most important factor in whether an investment succeeds or fails (NBER).
“Most founders plan carefully for the commercial side of scaling,” says Charlotte. “What it asks of them as leaders is talked about far less. When you’re stretched, decision making becomes tougher. I want to help founders spot signs of burnout early and lead through growth with a clear head.”
Charlotte’s mission is to keep women in business and in the rooms where decisions are made and ultimately to advance gender equality. She wants to leave a legacy in which future generations are led by a balance of female and male leaders.
“I want more women to build high-growth businesses and stay in them,” she adds. “These sessions are a chance to work alongside founders at the point where support can change how the next stage goes.”
“The impact on my ability to undertake my job successfully has been huge,” says a partnership manager Charlotte has coached. “Charlotte came along at a particularly strange juncture in my career, and turned potentially debilitating turbulence to a very manageable micro-wobble.”
Session places are limited to five and are offered on best fit. Applications close on 4th December, and all sessions will take place before 28th February 2027. Founders can read the criteria and apply through a short form at https://charlottedixonconsulting.com/female-founders. Charlotte will then arrange a brief call with each shortlisted founder.
Investors and accelerators who would like to explore supporting the founders they back with evidence-based psychological approaches can contact Charlotte directly.
