Emb Hashmi, founder of Storytelling for CEOs, is transforming how business leaders communicate with the help of the NatWest Entrepreneur Accelerator programme. The Accelerator provides ambitious entrepreneurs with mentorship, resources, and networking opportunities designed to help innovative businesses grow.
Before launching her own venture, Hashmi spent more than a decade at the BBC, shaping narratives and telling other people’s stories. Award-winningly skilled, she realized, however, that she had never told her own. “I could get anyone to tell their story,” she says. “A stranger on the worst day of their life, a politician dodging a question, a community fighting to be heard. But if someone had turned the camera on me and said, ‘So Emb, what’s your story?’ I’d have frozen.”
This gap between competence and communication – common among high achievers – became the inspiration for Storytelling for CEOs. The business helps executives articulate who they are, why they matter, and how to connect with their audiences effectively. Hashmi’s approach is simple yet powerful: a thirty-second window, a sand timer, and the challenge to tell your story. It’s a method she has tested on everyone from ambassadors to global CTOs, proving that talking and being heard are not the same thing.
Built from Birmingham with support from the NatWest Accelerator, Hashmi’s business reflects her unpretentious, practical approach to professional storytelling. The programme provided the launchpad, while the local corporate community offered her first clients, allowing her to turn years of journalistic experience into a tool for the business world.
Since joining the Accelerator, Hashmi’s work has gained significant recognition. Storytelling for CEOs has been shortlisted in the Best Start-Up category at the National Digital Awards, featured in the Business News Desk, and Hashmi herself has been listed among the FT’s Kindness Leadership Top 50. Adding to her entrepreneurial portfolio, she is co-founding the country’s first EdTech platform for women and has been selected to exhibit at one of Europe’s largest tech events, Laval, further extending her impact on professional growth and leadership development.
For those wishing to learn more or connect with Hashmi, she can be reached via Instagram or LinkedIn at @storytellingforceos, or through her website storytellingforceos.com.
The NatWest Entrepreneur Accelerator continues to empower founders like Hashmi, demonstrating the transformative potential of mentorship and structured support in helping businesses tell the stories that matter most. More information on the programme can be found here.
