Femme & Fortune

Two people can earn exactly the same salary. Ten years later, one is free for life and the other has nothing to show for it. The difference comes down to what they did with their money once it landed. In this video I break down how to turn your income into real wealth: the kind that eventually pays your bills for you, so work becomes a choice. It’s based on my Femme and Fortune podcast conversatio...

Most people leave tens of thousands of pounds on the table the day they accept a new job, and never even realise they’ve done it. Others earn well for an entire career and still never become wealthy. My Season 2 podcast guest Tara Lajumoke grew up on a council estate, went on to LSE and a Harvard MBA, and built a career at Goldman Sachs, McKinsey and the Financial Times. What makes her story diffe...

A few years ago I was about to put £25,000 into a startup. Brilliant founder, slick pitch deck, great story, numbers to back it up. Before I sent a penny, I made a couple of reference calls. What I heard made me walk away. Around 18 months later, that company collapsed. Startups can make you serious money, but most of the companies you back will fail. The investors who do well are rarely luckier o...

How to Invest in Startups With Just £10If you’d put £1,000 into Revolut in 2016, it would be worth around £900,000 today. And you didn’t need to be rich to do it. Early investors got in through equity crowdfunding, from as little as £10.In this video, I walk you through exactly how startup crowdfunding works, how to get started on platforms like Crowdcube and Republic Europe, which type of investo...

When a life-changing amount of money finally lands in your account, most people expect pure joy. Often it feels flat, and that's exactly when the costly mistakes happen. In this Femme and Fortune deep dive, former Goldman Sachs wealth adviser Ayesha Ofori breaks down what to do (and what not to do) when a windfall arrives, whether it's a business sale, an inheritance, a divorce settlement...

Are you paying more tax than you need to? There's a good chance you are, not because of anything dodgy, but because nobody ever explained the rules. In this Femme and Fortune deep dive, former Goldman Sachs wealth adviser Ayesha Ofori breaks down the legal tax allowances the wealthy use every year, and why you don't need to be rich to use them too. Every pound you legally keep is a pound y...

In this episode of Femme and Fortune, I sit down with Kike Agoro, former Team GB athlete turned founder of BYP Network, the platform connecting Black professionals with career opportunities and building community across the UK.Kike takes us right back to the beginning. Growing up in Hackney and Dagenham, she represented Great Britain in javelin, interned at banks like Deutsche Bank and Goldman Sac...

From Goldman Sachs to a PhD in virology, Polly McMaster's path to founding The Fold was anything but a straight line, and the real story behind building the brand is one she's never fully told before. In this episode, Polly opens up about the parts of the entrepreneurial journey that don't make it onto LinkedIn: the panic attacks, the sleepless nights, and the wall of cash running out just as the...

Patricia Bright built one of the biggest platforms in the UK, then walked away from the version of it that didn't feel like her. In this episode, we talk about the £2,000 a month she was making before she understood her own worth, the mansions she has watched get repossessed, and why she is still not satisfied even with a seven figure property portfolio, all of it mortgage free. We get into he...

From a market stall in Primrose Hill to six bakeries and £6 million in revenue, all without a penny of outside investment, Kim Innes, founder of Humble Crumble, joins the podcast to talk about turning a simple observation ("why is this ice cream shop empty in winter?") into one of London's most viral food brands. Kim opens up about the £60 she made on day one (and the money she lost...

From a council estate in Peckham to Goldman Sachs, McKinsey and the Financial Times, Tara's career reads like a masterclass in building wealth as an employee. In this episode, we get into exactly how she did it. Tara opens up about growing up between two worlds, the shame she felt hiding where she lived, and the moment she realised her story wasn't a weakness but her biggest asset. We talk...

Livia advised governments and multinationals on political and geopolitical risk for a living. She spent her career helping some of the world's most powerful organisations decide who to trust and where the danger was. Then she sold her own company, walked away with millions, and left it sitting in cash for three years because she couldn't bring herself to trust anyone with it. In this episo...

In this episode of Femme and Fortune, I sit down with Victoria Peppiatt, three-time founder and Co-CEO of Hey Savi, the AI-powered fashion platform she describes as Shazam for fashion. Vic's journey is remarkable. She ran creative agency The Pink Group with her husband for 11 years, sometimes putting the mortgage on a credit card to keep things going. Then she co-founded Phrasee, an AI marketi...

In June 2023, the world watched as the search for the Titan submersible gripped every news channel and feed on the planet. Christine Dawood was on the support vessel. Her husband Shahzada and her 19 year old son Suleman were on board the sub. Three years on, Christine joins Ayesha for her most personal interview yet. This is not the story the headlines told. It is the story of who her family reall...

What if everything you were taught about money came too late? Louise Hill was 47, a single mum with two kids, a mortgage and virtually no savings when she quit her job to build GoHenry, the app that has taught millions of children how to earn, save and spend. In this episode she tells me how it really happened: the years of dead ends, the record breaking crowdfund that raised £4 million in a singl...

Everyone tells you that you need a completely original idea to build wealth. Here's why that's nonsense. In this Femme and Fortune deep dive, Ayesha breaks down one of the biggest myths in business: that you need a never been done before idea to build real wealth. Drawing on a conversation with Vivian Wong, cofounder of Little Moon's Mochi Ice Cream, Ayesha unpacks the concept of an ed...

Because for every Revolut, there are thousands of startups that go to zero and take every penny with them. In this Femme and Fortune deep dive, Ayesha Ofori breaks down how angel investing actually works, why you don't need to be wealthy to start (you can invest from as little as £10), and how two UK government schemes, SEIS and EIS, can give you back up to 50% of what you invest through tax r...

A high salary is not the same as wealth. For years Ayesha Ofori managed money for some of the wealthiest people around, and the thing that surprised her most was that almost none of them had a remarkable salary. What they had was ownership. In this Femme and Fortune Deep Dive, Ayesha breaks down the four shifts that separate people who earn well from people who actually build wealth, drawn from he...

I managed half a billion pounds for some of the wealthiest people in the country. Not one of them built that wealth from their salary. To close out Season 1 of Femme & Fortune, Ayesha Ofori turns the tables. After a whole season asking other women how they built their wealth, this time she's in the guest seat, answering the questions she gets asked most about her own journey. From a state...

She Turned a Loyalty Card Into £92 Million | Edwina Dunn OBE Every time you scan a supermarket Clubcard at the till, you are using something Edwina Dunn created. In this episode, Ayesha sits down with the woman who changed the way the entire retail world understands its customers. Edwina co-founded Dunnhumby with her husband Clive Humby, built the data engine behind the Tesco Clubcard, and went on...

From medicine to millions - Dr Ifeoma Ejikeme on building wealth through expertise Dr Ifeoma Ejikeme didn't follow the traditional path. She trained as a doctor, studied business management at Imperial College London, completed a fellowship at Columbia University, and then walked away from surgery to build something that didn't exist yet. Today she is the founder and medical director of Adonia Med...

Charlotte Baroukh is a chartered accountant and tax expert at Pie, the UK's first free tax app. She has built one of the most engaged finance communities on Instagram, breaking down the tax rules that most people were never taught. In this episode, Charlotte and Ayesha get into why your salary will never be enough to build real wealth, the tax mistakes that are costing self-employed women thou...

What happens when you give up everything for love and it still isn't enough? In this episode of Femme & Fortune, Ayesha sits down with Nathalie Lethbridge, a powerhouse who built an extraordinary career across three continents, rose to senior management at Disney, advised corporations on multi-million pound deals and still found herself starting over financially in her 50s. Nathalie opens...

Most people read picture books at age 8. Yvonne Bajela was reading the Financial Times. Growing up on a council estate in Mitcham, South London, Yvonne's father made sure of that. That early conditioning set her on a path to Goldman Sachs, strategy consulting, her own startup, and eventually a decade-long career in venture capital at some of Europe's most respected funds, including Local G...

What does it actually take to build a 30 million business and then sell it? In this episode of Femme & Fortune, Ayesha Ofori sits down with Thea Green MBE, founder of Nails Inc, to talk about the journey from starting a company at 23 with 250K to selling it to private equity in 2024. Thea was working as a fashion editor, earning 11K a year in London, when she spotted a gap no one else was seei...