Bev Hurley is an inspiring serial entrepreneur: a holder of the Queen’s Award for Enterprise Promotion, a winner of the 2011 First Women Awards for Business Services and one of the UK’s leading authorities on growing sustainable, successful enterprise.
Prior to being appointed Chief Executive of YTKO, Bev grew three successful businesses and speaks with a wealth of first hand experience about what is really needed to unlock the growth potential of entrepreneurship. Under her leadership, YTKO has seen strong year on year growth, creating new employment opportunities with the launch of offices in Leeds, Truro, Plymouth, Torbay, Bristol, Norfolk and France. The company now employs more than 85 people and provides business services across the UK and Europe to new entrepreneurs, successful SMEs and multinational corporations.
Bev founded Enterprising Women, a highly successful, not-for-profit business community that supports, trains and promotes a rapidly expanding national community of more than 8,000 women and their businesses. Highly commended by the European Commission, Enterprising Women provides a broad range of services, including mentoring, high growth and investment readiness programmes and a £10m growth loan fund with Lloyds TSB. The organisation has actively contributed to the creation of hundreds of sustainable new jobs and businesses, training more than 3,000 women to date. Enterprising Women was chosen by the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills as one of only three national best practice SME support programmes in 2009, and contributed to YTKO being awarded the prestigious Prowess Flagship of Flagships award for excellence in women’s enterprise support.
With a unique and proven start-up model that shows new entrepreneurs how to de-risk their ventures before launch, Bev has demonstrated repeated success with a holistic continuum of high quality support. Taking the new business founder from pre-start, through the early stages and into sustainability and growth must, she advocates, include access to finance at each stage.
As part of her work to create and build the Norfolk Network, a dynamic and thriving innovation and enterprise hub for the knowledge economy, Bev mobilised an early stage angel community, to connect ambitious, knowledge-based businesses and entrepreneurs with equity finance.
An active mentor, angel investor, lecturer and passionate UK Women’s Enterprise Ambassador, Bev holds a number of non-executive directorships in both the private and public sectors. She is an Enterprise Fellow of the University of East Anglia, a Fellow of the RSA and has recently been elected to the Board of the Institute of Economic Development (IED).