Sahar Hashemi

Sahar Hashemi

Pioneering Entrepreneur & Global Authority on Corporate Agility and Intrapreneurship

Core Intelligence Domain: Innovation
Location: London, United Kingdom | Languages: English
Representation: Represented globally by PSpeakers Global Intelligence

Sahar Hashemi OBE is a globally recognised business leader, former lawyer, and visionary entrepreneur who has fundamentally redefined how legacy corporations approach growth, agility, and innovation. Having co-founded Coffee Republic—building it into one of the United Kingdom’s most prominent high-street brands with a £50 million market capitalisation—and subsequently launching Skinny Candy, she seamlessly bridges the gap between grassroots entrepreneurialism and C-suite strategic execution. Today, she leverages her proprietary frameworks to advise multinational boards on embedding a “start-up mentality” within complex, multinational infrastructures, ensuring resilience and adaptability in volatile markets.

Recognised by Her Majesty The Queen as a Pioneer to the Life of the Nation and awarded an OBE for services to the UK economy and to charity, Hashemi’s strategic foresight is highly sought after by Fortune 500 and FTSE 100 organisations. She sits at the intersection of public policy and private enterprise, notably serving as Co-Chair of the UK Government’s Scale Up Taskforce, where she shaped national strategies to accelerate business growth. Her best-selling publications, including Anyone Can Do It and Start-Up Forever, serve as definitive guides for executives seeking to dismantle bureaucratic inertia, empower intrapreneurs, and unlock organic growth through radical un-learning and customer-centricity.

Core Leadership Roles & Strategic Achievements

• Co-Founder & Former Director, Coffee Republic: Scaled the enterprise from a conceptual framework into a dominant high-street staple comprising 110 stores, fundamentally disrupting the UK food and beverage sector.
• Founder, Skinny Candy: Pioneered the guilt-free confectionery market, demonstrating a repeatable mastery of trend-forecasting and brand creation before a successful acquisition by Glisten PLC.
• Co-Chair, UK Government Scale Up Taskforce: Appointed to advise governmental bodies on economic policies and structural frameworks designed to accelerate the growth trajectory of scale-up businesses across the nation.
• Bestselling Author & Thought Leader: Authored Anyone Can Do It (one of the UK’s highest-selling books on entrepreneurship) and Start-Up Forever, a corporate manual for institutionalising agile behaviours.
• Advisory Board Member & Philanthropist: Dedicated member of the Council of the Prince’s Trust, actively engaged in mentoring the next generation of business leaders and driving socio-economic empowerment.

Proprietary Frameworks: “Start-Up Forever”

Hashemi’s strategic consulting is heavily anchored in her proprietary Start-Up Forever methodology, which identifies critical behavioural shifts required to transform sluggish corporate monoliths into dynamic, agile entities. The framework focuses on:

• Un-learning the Corporate Protocol: Dismantling legacy processes that stifle creativity and replacing them with bias-to-action protocols.
• Bootstrapping the Corporate Ecosystem: Cultivating resourcefulness over resource-dependency to drive lean innovation and rapid prototyping.
• Fostering a Culture of “Cluelessness”: Encouraging executive curiosity and continuous learning rather than relying solely on historical expertise, enabling faster adaptation to market disruptions.
• The Power of Boot-on-the-Ground Empathy: Closing the proximity gap between the boardroom and the end consumer to ensure product and service relevance.

Primary Speaking Themes

• Igniting the Intrapreneur: Strategies for leaders to empower employees, encouraging them to think and act like business owners to drive internal innovation.
• Agile Leadership in a Disruptive Era: Equipping C-suite executives with the strategic foresight required to navigate uncertainty, restructure teams, and pivot efficiently.
• Demystifying Innovation: Breaking down the misconception that innovation requires massive R&D budgets, focusing instead on everyday, incremental, and actionable progress.
• Customer-Centric Transformation: Aligning operational metrics with genuine customer empathy to rebuild brand loyalty and competitive advantage.
• Resilience & The Entrepreneurial Mindset: Lessons from the frontlines of scaling businesses, managing failure, and maintaining a relentless focus on long-term vision.

Key Takeaways

• Organisations must shift from rigid bureaucracies to agile ecosystems by embedding entrepreneurial habits across all levels of the workforce.
• Innovation is not an isolated departmental function; it is an organic, daily practice driven by curiosity, un-learning, and employee empowerment.
• True strategic agility requires executives to bridge the gap between boardroom theory and frontline reality, prioritizing deep, empathetic engagement with the customer base.
• Resource constraints should be leveraged as a catalyst for creative problem-solving and rapid prototyping, rather than viewed as a barrier to growth.
• Sustainable corporate resilience is achieved when leadership actively dismantles silos, champions failure as a learning metric, and cultivates an ownership mentality throughout the enterprise.