A Chorley-based agency owner is set to host a Manchester summit aimed at reshaping how female entrepreneurs build and scale their businesses.
Del Parsons, who runs both a marketing business and a property portfolio, will stage her third annual Marketing & Sales Summit for female founders on 14 May 2026 at the Voco hotel in Manchester city centre.
The one-day event will focus on what Parsons describes as a growing issue for founders: over-reliance on personal branding at the expense of long-term business value.
“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.”
Parsons argues that an emphasis on founder-led visibility can create structural challenges for scaling businesses.
“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.”
The summit will explore how founders can build systems, intellectual property and repeatable sales processes to support growth beyond the individual.
Parsons, a Chartered Marketer and Certified Mastercoach, previously spent more than 20 years working agency-side with brands including L’Oreal, Sainsbury’s and Compare the Market. She now focuses on supporting founders to build what she describes as more sustainable business models.
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.”
This year’s speaker line-up includes branding consultant Desislava Dobreva, BEYOUROWN founder Samanah Duran, and WUKA co-founder Ruby Raut, alongside contributors from legal, sales and performance coaching backgrounds.
The event is backed by Peake Event Group, with founder Nicola Peake named as headline sponsor. Organisers say the summit will run from 9am to 5.30pm and include speaker sessions, networking and workshops.
