Sahar Hashemi OBE – ‘Start-Up’ Culture in a Big Company

Entrepreneur, Co-Founder of Coffee Republic, Bestselling Author & Expert on Entrepreneurial Mindset, Innovation and Business Growth

Speaker Overview

Sahar Hashemi OBE is one of the UK’s leading voices on entrepreneurship, innovation and creating an entrepreneurial mindset inside established organisations.

Best known as the co-founder of Coffee Republic, Sahar helped build the business from an idea around a kitchen table into one of the UK’s most recognised high-street brands, growing to more than 100 stores.

Her experience gives her a rare perspective on both sides of business. She understands the energy, customer focus and agility of a start-up, but also what happens when organisations grow and processes, hierarchy and established ways of working begin to slow innovation down.

Sahar is the bestselling author of Anyone Can Do It and Start Up Forever, which explores how larger organisations can maintain the behaviours that make entrepreneurial businesses innovative, adaptable and customer-focused.

She is also the founder of Buy Women Built, a movement created to increase the visibility and commercial success of women-built brands.

Sahar’s keynotes are energetic, practical and highly relevant to organisations navigating transformation, changing customer expectations and the need to innovate faster.

Popular Speaking Topics

Creating an Entrepreneurial Mindset

How individuals and teams can rediscover the curiosity, ownership and bias towards action that characterise successful entrepreneurs.

Innovation in Large Organisations

How established businesses can overcome bureaucracy and ingrained ways of working to become more innovative and agile.

Start Up Forever

How organisations can retain the energy, customer obsession and entrepreneurial behaviour of a start-up as they grow.

Anyone Can Do It

Drawing on the story of building Coffee Republic, Sahar challenges the idea that entrepreneurship belongs to a particular type of person and demonstrates how entrepreneurial behaviours can be learned.

Customer-Centred Innovation

Why staying close to customers is essential for identifying opportunities, challenging assumptions and driving sustainable growth.

Leading Through Change

How leaders can encourage experimentation, adaptability and personal ownership when organisations and markets are changing rapidly.

Turning Ideas Into Action

Why innovation depends not simply on generating ideas, but on developing the confidence and behaviours required to make things happen.

Why Book Sahar Hashemi?

Sahar combines an inspirational entrepreneurial story with practical lessons that can be applied inside some of the world’s largest organisations.

Unlike speakers who approach innovation purely from an academic or consulting perspective, Sahar has personally built and scaled businesses. She understands what entrepreneurial behaviour looks like in practice and why that behaviour can disappear as organisations become larger.

Her work focuses on translating the entrepreneurial mindset into simple, repeatable behaviours that employees and leaders can use in their everyday work.

She is particularly effective for organisations undergoing transformation, leadership teams seeking greater agility and commercial teams that need to reconnect innovation with the needs of their customers.

Audiences Leave With:

• A clearer understanding of entrepreneurial thinking
• Practical ways to increase innovation and creativity
• Greater confidence to take ownership and act on ideas
• Strategies for staying closer to customers
• Ways to challenge bureaucracy and established thinking
• A stronger appetite for experimentation and change
• Practical behaviours that help organisations become more agile

Biography

Sahar Hashemi OBE is an entrepreneur, bestselling author and internationally recognised speaker on entrepreneurial mindset and innovation.

After initially pursuing a career in corporate law, Sahar left the legal profession and co-founded Coffee Republic with her brother Bobby.

Inspired by the coffee-bar culture she had experienced in New York, they launched Coffee Republic in London in 1995. The business grew from its first location into a nationally recognised brand with around 110 stores.

Sahar documented the experience in the bestselling Anyone Can Do It, written to challenge the belief that entrepreneurs are born rather than made.

She later founded the sugar-free confectionery brand Skinny Candy, which was subsequently acquired by Glisten Plc.

Her experiences building businesses led Sahar to explore a wider question: why do the entrepreneurial behaviours that help organisations succeed at the beginning often disappear as those organisations grow?

Her book Start Up Forever explores how established organisations can create cultures where people remain curious, customer-focused, adaptable and willing to take action. The book was named a Financial Times Business Book of the Month.

Sahar has also played a role in the wider UK entrepreneurial ecosystem, including co-chairing the UK Government’s Scale Up Taskforce and serving on the board of the ScaleUp Institute. She was awarded an OBE in 2012 for services to the UK economy and charity.

Today, she is also the founder of Buy Women Built, which champions women-built brands and encourages consumers to support them through their purchasing choices.

Speaking Style

Energetic, inspiring and practical. Sahar combines personal storytelling with clear business lessons and actionable ideas that encourage audiences to rethink how they approach innovation, customers and change.

Ideal Audiences

• Leadership Conferences
• Innovation and Transformation Events
• Sales Conferences
• Customer and Marketing Conferences
• Employee Engagement Events
• Leadership Development Programmes
• Corporate Offsites
• Change and Transformation Programmes
• Entrepreneurship and Growth Conferences
• Large Enterprise Leadership Teams

Key Takeaway

Sahar Hashemi demonstrates that entrepreneurial thinking is not reserved for founders and start-ups.

By reconnecting people with curiosity, customer focus, ownership and a willingness to act, organisations can unlock entrepreneurial energy within their existing workforce.

Her message helps leaders and teams become more innovative, adaptable and commercially focused, even within large and complex organisations.

Book Sahar Hashemi For Your Event

Sahar Hashemi delivers energetic and practical keynote presentations that help organisations build entrepreneurial thinking, accelerate innovation and turn ideas into action.

Drawing on her experience building Coffee Republic and other ventures, she demonstrates how the behaviours associated with successful entrepreneurs can be applied within established organisations to increase agility, customer focus and growth.

Her talks are ideal for leadership conferences, sales meetings, innovation events, transformation programmes and corporate offsites where organisations want their people to think differently, embrace change and take greater ownership.

Contact us today to check availability and discover how Sahar Hashemi can help your audience think and act more entrepreneurially.