Sandy Plange leads the Enterprising Women programme which is a community of over 7,000 women in enterprise, seeking specialist business and growth support in the UK. She regularly delivers presentations to a wide and varied audience, ranging from industry conferences to stakeholder best practice seminars to raise awareness of the importance of women’s enterprise and its contribution to UK GVA.

Her role includes the creation and delivery of a wide range of project management, marketing, networking and new business development activities and customer relationship management. This has delivered excellent results, demonstrated through the continuing national growth of the community by this under-represented enterprise group. As well as women’s enterprise, engaging and working with BME audiences’ is one of Sandy’s key passions. She has achieved up to 30% higher representation and participation than in the sub-regional populations, as well as a broad cross-sectoral spread.

Sandy is an active member of the East of England Women in Enterprise steering group, South East of England Women in Enterprise steering group and the Yorkshire Forward Women in Enterprise Steering group. She is also a member of the East of England BME Taskforce and its BMEs in Enterprise sub group. She is also a member of the newly formed National Women’s Enterprise Group and the National Black Women’s Network. Sandy is also one of Enterprising Women’s mentors, currently mentoring women new to enterprise.

Sandy comes from a broad commercial background which began in HR working for United Airlines. After which she changed direction to develop a successful career in PR, reputation management and business consultancy, working for agencies in and around London. This enabled her to work with a variety of SMEs to large corporate in the telecoms, IT and professional services sectors (including Hewlett Packard, Creative Labs, Vodafone and Cap Gemini) as well as the business education market and public sector (Henley Business School).