Shownotes

Not all Asians have the same stories and experiences. My guest on The Elephant in the Room podcast this week Farzana Baduel, a successful entrepreneur and Co-Founder of Curzon PR was inspired by her mother and her aunts who ran their own successful businesses in Pakistan. She also considers her identity as a British Asian to be her strength, something that has helped her straddle two worlds. 

In the episode we spoke about her entrepreneurial journey, setting up multiple businesses, 

👉🏾 The impact of a world in flux on the PR/Comms Industry

👉🏾 Comms on Board, has the time come? 

👉🏾 Diversity washing

👉🏾 Purpose vs/and Profit

👉🏾 Her definition of leadership and leadership style

We also spoke about her role models, beliefs, immigrant work ethics she inherited from her parents, work like balance, kindness, believing in the potential for what we can achieve……

Memorable Passages from the podcast:

👉🏾Thank you so much for having me. 

👉🏾 I guess I am a mom and a wife. And I also run a PR firm called Curzon and British Asian, married to an Italian, love diversity, live diversity. And I love being a communications bridge between different cultures. 

👉🏾 I think my identity it shapes what I do. So sort of being brought up in two cultures, the South Asian culture and the British culture, it just innately made it quite intuitive to work not only within the British and the South Asian culture but to work with lots of other cultures.

👉🏾 Because I think when you sort of straddle two cultures growing up, you have the ability to have that sort of level of empathy of being an outsider and that really helps to build bridges, build trust. And I find my sort of identity as a British Asian has massively helped me not just straddling these two worlds, but straddling multiple worlds and most importantly connecting worlds.

👉🏾 I think I was quite lucky because my maternal grandfather was a huge sort of feminist and he used to always say to his daughters, my mother and my aunt, education is really important and career, so do not stop at just the education. So in Pakistan, he had five daughters and he was a huge sort of proponent of women working, women in the workplace back then in Pakistan.

👉🏾 So I think that sort of really percolated throughout our family. So, growing up my mother was well educated, my aunts had businesses in Pakistan, my mother had businesses. And so I grew up there were women in leadership positions, be it a small business, a large business, freelance, it was the norm for me.

👉🏾 So for me, I kind of almost aped the women who are in my family and but what I really admire is actually those women out there who set up businesses who didn't have those role models in their family. I think those women should be celebrated, cuz women like me, actually, I had role models growing up.

👉🏾 So it was something that growing up, it just nurtured me into believing that is also a path that I can easily take. Sure. Well I left university after my second year, so at the age of 20, I set up my first business, which was a tax business, and I ran it for around 10 years. And then the PR business, I've been running for about 13 years.

👉🏾And I would say that actually the tax business was fairly straightforward and easy. I think also because it just came naturally to me. I was good at mathematics, I was good at processes. And so the tax business was relatively easy for me to run and do well in....