A women's networking event at Middlesbrough Football Club in 2000 set Ann Stonehouse on a route which has led to her winning a Queen's Award for Enterprise Promotion.
"The ladies I connected with at that table I'm still in contact with," says Ms Stonehouse, who has become well known in her native Teesside as an advocate for enterprise and entrepreneurship, particularly among women. "That event gave me the confidence to realise there were other businesswomen out there."
She is not alone in identifying lack of confidence as a key issue which can curb female entrepreneurship. Another of this year's Enterprise Promotion award winners, South Wales-based Christine Atkinson, makes exactly the same observation. "Lack of confidence is so pervasive," she says.
Ms Atkinson, head of the Women's Enterpreneurship Hub at the University of South Wales, where she is also deputy director of the Centre for Enterprise, says the combination of lack of confidence and stereotypical attitudes can lead women to be "ghettoised", choosing business areas such as crafts and complementary health where there is in fact intense competition.
"They need to make sure they aren't moving into a really low paid area of work," she says. "It's quite hard to stand out and go against the tide."
Ms Stonehouse believes some of this confidence gap results from the time many women spend out of the workplace for family reasons. "They become somebody's mother at home," she says. "They lose their own path." But, she adds, once they start networking with other women, who share contacts and provide support, "It's a very quick transition."
Both women have personal experience of running their own businesses.
Ms Stonehouse had set up her own company, offering accountancy services to small businesses, just before she went to the Middlesbrough FC event. She continues to run Willowbank Accountancy alongside her many voluntary networking and mentoring commitments.
She became a director of Women into the Network, a northeast England initiative which held the event she attended, and in 2009 she founded Assist Women's Network, a Teesside-wide body which she chairs. She is also very active promoting young enterprise, for both sexes, runs seminars at university and further education college level on accountancy, tax and enterprise and has recently founded a new group, Women Support Women, linked to a charity helping women at the social margins.
Ms Atkinson ran her own consultancy business, Praxis, which focused on equality-related training and research, before moving in 1999 to the University of Glamorgan - now part of the University of South Wales - to take up a post researching the personal and business support needs of women in South Wales. This focused her on providing assistance to potential female entrepreneurs, mainly from disadvantages areas.
The Women's Entrepreneurship Hub, which she set up in 2008, combines research, policy and practice; with £5m funding from the European Social Fund and the Welsh government it is researching the underlying causes of gender pay inequalities. She also founded the Vale Women's Business Network which supports women starting businesses and has run a series of training courses for women at all levels of work.
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>Both women believe female entrepreneurs also bring particular qualities to the role. "Women tend to be much more realistic about their business and idea and what they can achieve," says Ms Atkinson. Ms Stonehouse says women are good at seeing the "big picture" and can be more objective. "Men can be very driven." Women, she says, are less likely to take risks. But, she adds, both need the "risk gene" to succeed in business.Female entrepreneurship is developing, says Ms Atkinson, although she feels progress has been "painfully slow". "It seems there's still quite a way to go."
However, in one area which has often been tricky for women, Miss Stonehouse has seen change; many of her male business clients are now involved in childcare because their wives are working. "I find a lot of men now saying, I don't work Friday because that's my day as dad."
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