No. 1 ladies’ investment club
FORMING SCM Ladies Investment Club has realised a passion for Gina Miller. The marketing impresario is not afraid of a challenge and her next one is to try to inform wealthy and successful women how to invest for themselves.
Miller is impeccably dressed and looks far younger than her 46 years. The mother of three, including two young children and a daughter with special needs, is used to juggling many balls. On top of the SCM Ladies Investment Club that she set up in April this year, she looks after her family’s philanthropic foundation and is the co-founder and director of marketing for SCM Private, the investment firm she runs with her husband.
Miller, who was born in Peru and is half Guyanese, started working for BMW’s events department in 1985 after completing a law degree. She started her own marketing agency in 1996 called Sway that targeted the financial services industry. By 2000 she could see a gap in the market to revolutionise the distribution of retail financial products: “I could see there was a problem. The people who developed the products didn’t have a direct line to the financial advisers who sold them to the public.” Miller pounced on the opportunity and organised a series of conferences that brought together the product providers and the financial advisers. She called it the Senate Programme and the first conference was held in Monte Carlo in 2000. The company was sold to Incisive Media in 2005.
Miller has also had to deal with the media spotlight. Her husband is Alan Miller, the New Star fund manager who hit the headlines when he challenged a legal ruling that would make him pay £5m to his former wife after only being married to her for three years. The case went all the way to the House of Lords. Miller was 100 per cent behind her future husband’s decision: “He asked me before the divorce proceedings if I would be okay with all of the publicity. Of course I would. The British law needed to be changed.”
The SCM Ladies Investment Club is no lightweight club for ladies who lunch. The club meets twice a year in central London and the ladies are given access to financial advisers and educational lectures and material and whilst it is free to attend, the attendees are all successful women. Miller talks frankly about the predicament many women will face in the future: “Women are living much longer than men, but save much less. They think investing is a man’s world that is beyond them, but it’s not.”
Miller could be the poster girl for being a successful working mother. So what is the secret of her success? “I can survive on little sleep,” she laughs. Her advice to other entrepreneurs is to always work hard. “My mother said to never take anything for granted. Everything could be gone tomorrow, you have to learn to work.” Miller is now spreading that female wisdom through her ladies’ investment club.
CV | GINA MILLER
Lives: London
Car you drive: Audi R8 “I like something speedy,” she says.
Reading: 1412 – The Year China Discovered The World by Gavin Menzies and The Mr Men / Little Misses series to the children.
Any ladies interesting in attending can contact Gina at [email protected]