Context

In early 2020, as the UK entered the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, small and micro-enterprises were forced into unprecedented turbulence. Nations locked down, supply chains fractured, and consumer behaviour shifted overnight. In the UK alone, SMEs represented 99.3% of all private-sector businesses, employing around 13.3 million people and generating a combined turnover of £1.6 trillion — making them the country’s economic backbone (UK SME statistics).

Within this ecosystem, women-led ventures faced disproportionate vulnerability. Globally, research covering 40,000 firms across 49 countries found that women-led businesses were more likely to experience larger sales drops and slower recoveries during the pandemic (World Bank, 2023). In the UK, only 32% of businesses were female-led, and those firms tended to be smaller, more service-based, and less likely to access external finance (UENI, 2021).

A CARE International report captured the depth of this inequality, warning that the pandemic had “rolled back progress on gender equality by a generation.” Female entrepreneurs, who made up roughly 40% of the UK’s micro-businesses, were particularly affected due to reduced capital access, unpaid care responsibilities, and cash-flow fragility. Equity data confirmed this structural gap — in 2020, only 13% of total investment went to female-founded startups (Enterprise Nation, 2020).

Amid this landscape of risk and reorientation, Canterbury Partners, an impact-driven investment network founded by Kim Morrish, sought to reposition one of its portfolio companies — a women’s health and wellness brand serving menopausal and post-menopausal audiences — for long-term stability. The objective was to identify potential acquisition or merger pathways with a larger, purpose-aligned entity capable of providing the scale and operational resilience that the company lacked in the uncertainty of 2020.

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Approach

Manuh Collective was commissioned to support this strategic repositioning through a targeted market-mapping and merger readiness study. The process began by diagnosing the company’s positioning within a fragmented and fast-shifting sector. The women’s health market was beginning to show enormous potential — valued at USD 2.1 billion in 2024 and projected to reach USD 3.0 billion by 2030 (Grand View Research) — yet many players were early-stage and vulnerable to short-term shocks.

Manuh Collective developed a structured framework to identify two tiers of strategic partners:

1. Female-led health and wellness startups — particularly those backed by VC or trust funding and working in adjacent spaces like reproductive health, mental wellness, or menopause-specific digital services.

2. Larger multinational corporations — including companies in energy, retail, construction, and facilities management, which had publicly committed to CSR and ESG agendas aligned with employee wellbeing, supply-chain transparency, and responsible business practices.

Each entity was profiled across funding structure, leadership composition, pricing, product offering, and market reach. Attention was also paid to supplier networks, communication ecosystems, and marketing maturity, ensuring that any prospective match went beyond commercial fit to include cultural and ethical alignment.

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Outcome

Findings were synthesised into a strategic merger brief that outlined 3–5 high-potential partnership and acquisition opportunities. Each recommendation was paired with a tailored outreach and engagement strategy, highlighting decision-maker mapping and value alignment narratives.

The final report also offered a macro-level scan of the UK women’s health investment landscape, identifying emerging collaboration trends between corporate CSR programmes and female-founded wellness startups. This provided Canterbury Partners’ leadership with a longer-term strategic lens for future investments.

The engagement culminated in the successful merger of the portfolio company with a larger entity — facilitated in part through Canterbury Partners’ established network within the built environment and sustainability sectors.

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Reflection

The Canterbury Partners case illustrates how crisis management in early-stage and impact-driven ventures often unfolds in two phases. In the short term, survival depends on conviction, agility, and the ability to move quickly within trusted networks — to find stability by housing a company within an ally’s structure or leveraging existing relational capital. These tactical pivots are acts of leadership under pressure, guided more by clarity of intent than by formal process.

But in the long term, endurance requires strategy, not improvisation. The success of this engagement lay not only in enabling an immediate merger but in preparing the company for future autonomy — ensuring that its values and operational integrity could endure whether nested within a partner or standing independently. By combining rapid decision-making with values alignment, Canterbury Partners and Manuh Collective demonstrated that continuity during disruption is not just about finding a safe harbour, but about choosing the right waters to re-enter.

This case underscores how leadership conviction, adaptive alliances, and strategic clarity together create a resilient path through uncertainty — turning short-term reaction into long-term renewal.

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Organisation: Canterbury Partners
Location: United Kingdom
Year: 2020
Website: canterburypartners.co.uk
Role & Duration: Consultant – Market Research & Strategy | 2 months (April–May 2020, start of the COVID-19 pandemic)