What does H.E.R. Entrepreneur stand for and what gives you the idea to start-up something so cool yet much needed?
H.E.R stands for “Harnessing The Power Of Women In Entrepreneurship, Leadership and Relationship”.
While conducting SkillsFuture course “Steps to Starting a Business”, I realized that the participants were mostly women and even though they hope to start a business, they tend to be risk averse with self-limiting beliefs and lacked the confidence to do so due to the lack of a supportive community and social capital.
I greatly relate with this as I witnessed my own entrepreneurial mother overcame challenges with limited access to education and faced rapid changes in this modernising world while trying to ensure her children could have a proper education.
Thus, I decided to create H.E.R Entrepreneur, a media platform for entrepreneurs to be inspired, educated and empowered through our online resources, meetups, workshops and conferences.
What are the core activities for H.E.R. Entrepreneur?
Our monthly H.E.R LearnXNetwork sessions, our community building activities, our free online educational content and our yearly H.E.R Asia Summit and now we are also launching H.E.R Malaysia Summit.
Networking – H.E.R Entrepreneur hosts monthly LearnXNetwork session for entrepreneurs, leaders and investors to come together to get inspired by industry experts and network with each other. Our LearnXNetwork sessions usually feature panel discussions with speaking and sharing segments and networking amongst our participants.
Community – Our community includes SME owners, entrepreneurs and industry leaders. We share SME and entrepreneurship articles, videos and discussions with the H.E.R Community on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn apart from the LearnXNetwork sessions. We believe in creating a community of like-minded individuals for entrepreneurs to inspire, educate and empower one another.
Our platform encourages diversity and inclusion and thus do see attendees of both genders and from multiple cultural backgrounds attending our sessions.
How has 2019 been personally and for H.E.R. Entrepreneur?
We are into the first quarter of 2019 now and it has been good so far. As my baby boy grows, so does my business & 2019 will also be the year for expansion for us as we have incorporated in Malaysia and will continuously be driving the business growth in Asia. Expansion might apply to our family as well, I hope.
For H.E.R Entrepreneur, we just celebrated our 3rd Anniversary Bash with a panel of inspiring speakers for the topic of “What Inspired H.E.R” in January and also completed our 2nd LearnXNetwork session on 13 February about “Influencing Millennials” with local influencers and social media strategists.
So far, 2019 has been smooth-sailing as we’re confirming speakers for our annual H.E.R Asia Summit 2019 happening on 2nd & 3rd October 2019, Virtual Summit on 3-5 April 2019 and our H.E.R Malaysia Summit on 6 November 2019. We are also in the process of planning for more exciting LearnXNetwork sessions both in Singapore (monthly) and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (bi-monthly).
The community is gradually growing due to word-of-mouth and this year our direction is to promote international exchange of ideas and network with the regional network.
Furthermore, we’re recently in talks with charitable organisations to be able to contribute back to a wider community by providing free training programs online and offline to low-income families.
In terms of branding and marketing, what have your strategies been?
Our strategy has always been Omni-channel marketing – offline and online marketing. Our holistic omnichannel solution includes B2B digital and offline marketing for brand awareness, lead generation, prospect marketing, etc.
For offline activities, we go out for networking sessions, we exhibit in SME events, our training business allows us to have the face-to-face interaction with our clients as well which helps, we do call up prospects to get in touch too. We hold monthly networking sessions and the yearly summits to engage with the community and clients.
For digital activities, we are active in providing educational content on our blogs and social media, we interview esteemed entrepreneurs and showcase them, we promote our events digitally through EDMs and social media, and we do conduct interesting campaigns to raise awareness of entrepreneurship for women as well, which are shared digitally. An interesting experiment coming up is our H.E.R Virtual Summit in which we will be holding the event remotely for the region to benefit as well.
What are your 5-year plans for H.E.R. Entrepreneur?
The 5-year goal is to uplift H.E.R Entrepreneur such that it will be Asia’s largest media platform for educating & providing support for women entrepreneurs and leaders online and offline.
Any plans to expand H.E.R. Entrepreneur Summit beyond Singapore, Renee?
This year will be the first year we are launching H.E.R. Entrepreneur Summit in Malaysia on 6 November 2019. We do have plans on expanding across other region and we are eyeing on the Philippines too.
Anything you wish to share with our readers, Renee?
Just a quote from me: “If you would like to achieve something, go do it. Life is short, the stars will never be aligned just like the traffic lights will never turn green at the same time. If not now when, if not you, who?”
Best way to contact you.
You can contact me at renee.tan@herentrepreneur.com or drop me a message on my LinkedIn, HER Entrepreneur Facebook Page and Instagram.
