Episode #13
Episode 13: "She Said Yes to What She Needed, and No to Everything Else"
Length: 57 minutes | Released: September 15, 2026 Emmie Faust on burnout, boundaries, and building an 11,000-woman community from a Google form. Emmie Faust has built, scaled and exited businesses, won investment on Dragons' Den, invested in more than thirty female-led companies, and built Female Founders Rise into a community of more than 11,000 women. She knows entrepreneurship from pretty much every angle. She's also been burnt out. After exiting her business, she spent years working as a solo consultant, successful, in demand, and desperately lonely. She remembers telling her husband, "I feel really lonely." Then COVID arrived, and with it work, plus homeschooling four children at home, anxiety and peri-menopause. She got ill, physically, then mentally, and hit what she calls rock bottom. What she built next started with a Google form and a LinkedIn page: a small, low-stakes passion project, just to keep her brain ticking over while she recovered. Nearly four years on, it's Female Founders Rise: 11,000 women across the UK, a lean team, a growing ecosystem of investors, ambassadors and chapter leads, and the Rise Report, a benchmark piece of research into more than 2,000 female entrepreneurs. From being a lonely solo founder, Emmie now hosts events where women queue around the room to speak to her, to the point where she's had to hide in the toilet just to get a moment to herself! That's the thing about Emmie: she's enormously wise, and just as enormously honest and real. In this conversation, she tells what happened when she started building a business, and a life, differently, by saying yes to what she actually needed, and getting much, much better at saying no to everything else. Guest bio Emmie Faust, Founder, Female Founders Rise Emmie Faust is the founder of Female Founders Rise , a UK-based, impact-led community and certified B Corporation supporting more than 11,000 female and non-binary entrepreneurs. She is an exited entrepreneur, a micro angel investor in more than 30 female-led businesses, and a Dragons' Den winner. Founded in 2022, Female Founders Rise exists to help women build profitable, long-term businesses and to close the gender funding gap in the UK, working across four pillars: community, funding support, business fundamentals, and raising the profile of female founders. Its vision is a world where entrepreneurial opportunity is equally accessible to everyone. As the organisation points out, up to £310 billion of new value could be added to the UK economy if women started and scaled businesses at the same rate as men. Emmie is also the founder of The Rise Report of Female Entrepreneurship , a benchmark piece of research drawing on data, stories and insights from more than 2,000 UK female entrepreneurs. In this episode Timestamps approximate, from the transcript, confirm against the final edit. 00:16: Who Emmie Faust is, and where she's at right now, a mother of four, running Female Founders Rise, "living my best life" 01:07: What Female Founders Rise is, and the wider ecosystem of investors, allies and chapter leads behind it 04:53: The Rise Report, benchmarking 2,225 founders, and why it took far longer than she expected 09:59: The isolation of solo consultancy work, and telling her husband, "I feel really lonely" 10:48: Why she now says no to ninety per cent of everything 12:38: Quitting consultancy and starting Female Founders Rise as a low-stakes passion project 24:50: Rock bottom, a breakdown, a move back to London, and quitting consultancy for good 33:35: "Founders are limited on time, energy and money," treating energy as a finite resource 36:26: Redesigning how she shows up at events, and hiding in the toilet to get a moment alone 47:32: The week with no phone at all, and what it told her 51:29: Her biggest learning, her top advice to ambitious founders, and what she'd tell her younger self Mentioned in this episode Female Founders Rise (femalefoundersrise.com): the 11,000-member community Emmie founded The Rise Report of Female Entrepreneurship (therisereport.co.uk): benchmark research surveying 2,225 UK female entrepreneurs Female Founders Rise Show: the show Emmie co-hosts, on Spotify and YouTube Connect with Emmie Website: femalefoundersrise.com LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/emmiefaust Instagram: @emmiefaust Female Founders Rise on Instagram: @femalefoundersrise Female Founders Rise Show: Spotify · YouTube The Rise Report: therisereport.co.uk Connect with Nonie Take the Leadership Identity Quiz Find out more about the Unshakeable Method , Nonie's four-month 1:1 coaching programme. Next episode Nonie talks to Rachel Coles, an award winning marketing agency CEO, campaigner and author. A year ago, she was burnt out, miserable and convinced she was a terrible boss, waking up at 3am worrying about cash flow and whether her team could pay their mortgages, and taking on clients she didn't even want. Her business was actually doing really well. She just couldn't see it. Fast forward a year, and almost none of that is true anymore, and she's even writing a book about how she became an unshakeable leader. This conversation gets into what she thinks went wrong, what she did about it, and how becoming more herself changed everything else too.
