Mum on a mission to change how women build businesses

An entrepreneurial mum from Chorley who runs both a marketing business and a property portfolio, creating a seven figure income for her family, is making a stand against the grain of many marketing gurus, and she’s bringing some of the world’s most compelling voices along with her.

Del Parsons, 50, whose career spans having worked with L’Oreal, Sainsbury’s and Compare the Market, is preparing to challenge what many in the industry are preaching, as she hosts her third annual Marketing and Sales Summit for female founders in Manchester on Thursday 14th May 2026.

The event, held at Voco in the city centre, is the only one of its kind in the UK dedicated to ‘feel good marketing and selling for female founders’.

This year Del is back with a sharper focus than ever: helping female founders build businesses that grow in a way that means they can function without them.

“The market at the moment is full of people shouting about the power of personal brand,” she said.

“For women setting up or growing a business this can feel very overwhelming. I agree that visibility is important, and brilliant -  it helps us build trust -  but we can’t build an entire business on personal brand alone.”

Del, known as ‘The No-Nonsense Business Coach and Marketing Mentor’, has spotted a new and urgent conversation that isn’t happening at most business events.

Women are being told to build personal brands, show their faces, and lead from the front but Del believes this is creating a hidden risk that nobody is talking about.

“So many founders are unknowingly building founder dependency,” she said.

“All the trust, the authority, the demand -  it sits in them personally. That’s not scale, that’s a trap.

"It limits your ability to grow, it affects the sale value of your business, and it means the whole thing falls apart the moment you step back.”

This year’s Summit is built around answering the questions that follow: How do you become the visible face of your brand without becoming the bottleneck behind it? How do you turn your expertise into IP, your reputation into systems, and your sales process into something repeatable? How do you build business equity, not just personal equity?

As a chartered marketer and Certified Mastercoach with a degree in psychology and an ILM in Leadership and Management, Del spent over 20 years working in agencies with clients including L’Oreal, Sainsbury’s and Compare the Market before turning her focus to supporting other founders.

She is also the host of the podcast ‘More Than Marketing’, and is passionate about helping women build sustainable, scalable businesses without sacrificing their health or their lives outside of work.

She added: “We still have a problem around female entrepreneurship growth. The Rose Review shows that only one in three UK entrepreneurs is female, and unlocking women’s full potential could add £310 billion to the UK economy.

"Events like this exist to help close that gap,  not by telling women to do more, but by helping them do the right things with real intention.”

The 2026 lineup of the Sales & Marketing Summit is the most diverse and headline-worthy yet. Keynote speaker Desislava Dobreva, known as ‘The Branding Queen’, is a TEDx speaker and Forbes-featured entrepreneur who built a multi-million dollar brand without burnout or gimmicks, and has been mentoring seven-figure founders since 2017.

Joining her is Samanah Duran, founder of global female entrepreneur media platform BEYOUROWN and female-first coffee company Siren Grounds, and Ruby Raut, Nepali-born environmentalist and co-founder of WUKA,  the UK’s first reusable period underwear brand -  whose work sits at the intersection of climate action, gender equity and social justice.

Rounding out the speaker roster is an extraordinary mix of talent including Ben Franklin, psychic strategist and founder of Bold Intuition Co; New York based Shari Teigman, performance mentor and creator of The Maverick Edge; copywriter and brand voice strategist Georgina L Chapman; corporate lawyer and Legal 500-recommended Nikki Whittle of Brabners Solicitors; and returning speaker Leah Gregory, High Ticket Sales Expert, who helps founders scale to six and multi-six figures without pushy tactics.

Headline sponsor for 2026 is Nicola Peake, founder of Peake Event Group and PeakeFest,  a bold business festival dedicated to connecting ambitious entrepreneurs.

There are only a handful of tickets left for the one-day event, which runs from 9am to 5.30pm and includes a full day of speaker sessions, networking, a buffet lunch, pre-event online masterminds, an implementation workshop and exclusive post-event mixer.