Regina Mehler is an experienced marketing expert and successful author ("Der Phoenix Effekt“) who has just founded the "Women Speaker Foundation“ with a simple aim: to increase the number of women speakers on event stages.

For over 20 years Regina has worked in marketing for IT companies and is currently heading the marketing department of ADOBE Germany, responsible for marketing strategy in central Europe. In 2008 she was awarded the European Corporate Design Award in gold for the rebranding of the Software AG.

As a woman in the IT Business, Regina often found herself the only woman on the conference stage.

But she didn’t want to believe that no other women existed who could stand up and represent the female view. This belief inspired her to encourage other women to speak up and to give them a platform to present themselves.

So she founded the WOMEN SPEAKER FOUNDATION – a network of women who trust in their ideas and want to share their views.

I talked with Regina about why women are under-represented on the conference stage; and why we should be stepping up and asking for speaker engagements.

AK: Tell our community a little about yourself and your career history.

RM: I have been active in the IT Industry for more than 20 years and my career has been always been driven by curiosity about newest developments and cutting edge products and strategies. During this time my personal biggest successes have always happened when I‘ve created something seemingly impossible from scratch. In my book “Der Phönix Effekt” I describe such situations in markets where it seemed to be impossible to develop a new market in the required timeframe.

It’s not only about being creative, it is also a lot about being driven by a passion, to motivate necessary partners to participate and also being brave enough to swim against the mainstream and trust your ideas and visions.

AK: How did you come up with the idea for the "Women Speaker Foundation" and then arrive at the decision to turn your idea into a reality?

RM: I had been on stage presenting and realized again and again that I am usually the only woman on the agenda. Talking to event organizers they said they would love to have more of a gender mix on stage, but they struggled to find  female speakers. And there was the idea! I saw a gap in the market which needed to be filled as soon as possible.

I had lots of event organisers in my existing network and good links with senior female speakers. So the only question left was, how to bring the offer and the market together. The WOMEN SPEAKER FOUNDATION was born – one year ago.

AK: Women speakers are still under-represented on big conference stages. What are the main reasons for this in your opinion?

RM: I think it is a manifold issue. As long as we do not have enough female managers in Executive positions, even fewer will be on stage.

But also businesswomen need to learn to step up and ask for the challenge of being on stage. It is a self-investment to perfect one’s stage presentation and self-marketing is a necessity, neither of which come naturally to a lot of women.

We do like to be recognized for our qualities, but shy away from promoting ourselves too strongly. And we are not used to investing time and money into our careers. That includes personal development, such as coaching and constant learning. Since we started driving the WOMEN SPEAKER FOUNDATION, we‘ve realized that we‘ve hit a niche in the market; suddenly more and more business women are realizing how important it is to build up their own brand – and being on stage is an important part of this. We now have more than 300 female speakers registered and are receiving international speaking profiles.

AK: Was it easy to find women and what are your selection criteria?

RM: We had a great start with press coverage. So in less than a year we became a real brand in the speaking agency market. And that has been our biggest marketing tool. As businesswomen are realizing that networking is the key to success, we are getting recommended from one to the other.

We never ever believed that we would have more than 100 profiles registered in the first 6 months - and we had it in less than 10 weeks. .

Our strength on the market is also that we cover almost any topic, from the female product development engineer in the automotive industry to the polar research scientist; from a professional soccer player to the first German women climbing Mount Everest. It is important to us to have experienced speakers on stage with unique topics. In addition we also invest heavily in coaching more junior speakers to get started on stage. That way we are able to offer and cover almost any speaking opportunity, from Top100 companies to SMB businesses.

AK: Who are your customers and how hard is it to attract them? What is your marketing strategy?

RM: So far, customers and speakers have heard about us from press coverage. Especially in the beginning, the press have been curious about our innovative idea, so we’ve given a lot of interviews. Our customers today are a mix of corporate headquarters and smaller companies who read about us and had the idea (and/or the pressure) to invite a woman on stage. As mentioned above, the biggest, and for me the most effective, marketing tool for us is PR. In addition we run campaigns to drive traffic towards our website and social media. And the rest is all done by networking and word-of-mouth recommendations.

AK: What was your biggest challenge in building up and founding the company?

RM: Well, we want to be as professional as possible, so we are initially concentrating on developing the German speaking market first. Ideally I would have liked to have expanded into Europe already, as we are getting quite a lot of requests for international events and profile submissions from European female speakers.

AK: What is next for your company? Do you have plans to expand internationally?

RM: Yes, absolutely. In two directions: soon we will be working with German based event organisers looking for native English speakers, in addition to event organisers and speakers who approach us from from other European countries.

AK: What lessons have you taken from your successes and your failures?

RM: Not to get impatient :-). Sometimes I feel like an evangelist, selling the idea of a gender mix on the agenda, and what a big difference it can make. The audience does appreciate it and are requesting it more and more.

AK: Do you have any role models or mentors?

RM: Nope, I always wanted to have a mentor, but it never became a reality. But my passion for making a difference and therefore being innovative drives me in a very positive way.

AK: Do you have any advice or tips for women who are thinking of starting their own business?

Have a very clear plan about marketsize, offering and competition; define the unique selling point; bring tons of enthusiasm and creativity and never give up.

And don’t believe you need to do it all on your own. Networking is time consuming but in the end will save you time because of all the tips and advice that you get from other people.

Andrea Kolb is a marketing expert, social entrepreneur, founder of communication agency Calliope and co-founder (with her husband) of AnaYela, a "Place of Inspiration" in Marrakesh established as a hot spot for international thinkers. More recently Andrea has founded social fashion brand ABURY. Under the positioning of “Beyond Fashion”, ABURY combines the desire for style and ethics, exclusiveness and sustainability in a unique and innovative concept.