When the financial crash hit in 2008, Mia Drennan wasn’t scared – she saw an opportunity to build something new. Up until the market collapse, big companies had been handed loans and had the terms negotiated and upheld by banks. As trust in these institutions faltered, Drennan dreamed up GLAS (Global Loan Agency Services), an impartial, reliable, white-glove debt administration service that could handle the middleman tasks and paperwork for large debts.
She and her business partner took a leap in 2011 and invested £6,000 into the idea – 15 years later, GLAS has 14 offices across the UK, US, EU, Singapore, Hong Kong and Dubai and is valued at a minimum of £1bn, with Drennan’s share worth roughly £230m. Drennan is EY’s 2025 Entrepreneur of the Year and will compete for the global title this year.
I wanted to be a fighter pilot, but in the Eighties, women weren’t allowed to fly. So, I studied art and design at school, didn’t get a degree, and quickly realised I wouldn’t get a job. I handed out my CV in the City and started office temping. Eventually, I landed a job at KPMG, which was a real turning point for me. Soon, I was running a team of auditors in the capital markets team. After that, I got a job at the law firm Simmons& Simmons, where I learnt about debt repackaging. I was recruited by Citibank in the late 1990s and, at the beginning of 2000, the Bank of New York [Mellon] asked me to set up their structured finance business in Europe, which I turned into a multi-million dollar revenue line in five years.
My first business venture launched because I had the hump. In 2005, I was passed over for a promotion I was promised at the Bank of New York. I thought, ‘If you don’t want me, somebody else will, and I started looking for another job. A very niche US law firm was looking to open an office in London and asked me to help them. I said yes and set up a little office for them called Square Mile Connections. That business is still going today. After several months, the team that hired me left, but I’d been asked by the trustee market to help them find people for various positions. So, I pivoted and became a headhunter. But after the financial crash, I wanted to get back into transactional work.
We started GLAS with £6k and I put my half on a credit card. I didn’t have any savings because we’d just been through the crash – everyone was mortgaged up to their eyeballs. But I knew I didn’t want to work for anyone else ever again and there were lots of broken loans from companies that had borrowed loads of money during the crash and needed to be restructured. My partner, Brian Carne, was a magic circle law firm partner looking for a new job. He’d come to me because of the headhunting business, but I convinced him to help me with the GLAS instead. Thank you to the Bank of New York for giving me that opportunity.
It took 400 meetings in four months for us to land our first deal. I had a little bit of income, because I was still the owner of Square Mile. So, I was able to support my building of the new business. We started to get some green shoots, but nobody wanted to be the first to give us a deal. It finally came around June 2012, when two prominent law firms needed someone to sort a particular German transaction; they could only think of GLAS. That was the first one and they’re still a client today. Once we had one deal, we were mandated on deal after deal.
One particularly risky moment from the early days was when somebody from a very large American bank said they were going to send a man round from their agency team to check out our systems, processes and procedures. We didn’t have all of them in place yet because we were busy doing the marketing. Me and my business partner looked at each other and sprinted back to the office and started getting to work. Really, it was a good thing because we spent the time getting properly set up. The man from the agency never did turn up – but they did us a favour by threatening to.
I was on holiday in Portugal when GLAS made its first £1m in 2014. I couldn’t believe it. It was great validation. We celebrated every deal by ringing a bell in the office – but it was ringing so often it started annoying the people doing the work! We’re going to get a gong for big milestones instead.
It’s important to decide early whether your business is for lifestyle or legacy. A lifestyle business is absolutely fine if you can pay yourself a good income and have a nice living and a balanced life. But if you want to turn your business into a legacy company and eventually exit and turn it into a listed company, then you’ve got to have a very different mindset. So, answer that question before you start.
Only 144 women have built businesses over £50m. Fewer have ever built businesses over £100m and even fewer than that over a billion. Women are often not given the finance they need to start a business. Even just trying to get a £20,000 overdraft was really hard when starting my first venture. But women starting out now should know that there are a lot more organisations out there to help. There’s the Invest in Women taskforce, there’s The SuperScalers – and there’s more education available, too. If female founders want to scale a business, they can and they should.
It’s important to give your idea a chance. Just try and make it happen and see where it takes you. The worst-case scenario is that you fail – lots of people do. But remember, in America, if you’ve had five or six startups, that’s actually a good thing, because it’s experience. If you’ve got vision, it doesn’t have to be an original idea, It just needs to be better than whatever else exists out there.
Lucy Goff is a champion of FFinc Forward Faster Accelerator 100 – a UK-based business accelerator programme designed to help female-founded companies scale their growth faster, which was launched in September 2025. For more information, go to
