Laura Biggs Embraces Every Challenge With Zeal
Laura Biggs has built a career on turning modest ideas into sizable events, a path that began when she was 24 and borrowed money from her father to launch a menswear trade show called Northern Exposure in Harrogate.
Early lessons in finance and partnership
The first venture taught her that family loans can feel more pressing than bank debt. “My dad wanted to help me, yet I felt more pressure than if I had borrowed from the bank, because I didn’t want to let him down,” she explained. She also learned to choose partners who have “equal skin in the game,” after a business associate contributed no capital.
Those early setbacks did not dampen her drive. In 2013, she orchestrated a management buyout of BBC Haymarket Exhibitions, creating River Street Events. At the time she was managing director of a joint venture between Haymarket and BBC Worldwide, overseeing shows such as BBC Gardeners’ World Live and the BBC Good Food Shows.
Building River Street and learning resilience
The buyout required negotiating with two separating parties while securing funding from three sources. She says the process taught her “patience, resilience, and the value of sometimes saying nothing at all.” A lawyer, Rosemary Jackson, encouraged a “wait and see” approach, noting that “a couple of nights’ sleep can change the picture.”
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River Street grew quickly, running events that attracted more than 250,000 visitors a year and adding partnerships with Historic Royal Palaces and The Fertility Show. Not every launch succeeded; The Eat Well Show and the Bakes & Cakes Show floundered in saturated markets. “It’s so true of me that I’ll say, ‘come on, let’s just do it.’ It’s quite typical of my personality to give everything a go,” she said, emphasizing trial and error as part of the entrepreneurial journey.
When Immediate Media approached her in 2019, she negotiated a sale that took effect at the end of 2020, keeping only The Fertility Show. The pandemic then forced her to pivot the remaining business online, birthing Intuitive Events.
Intuitive Events was a home‑grown operation, run by Biggs and her husband, creative director Phil Spurr, while they cared for a teenager and a four‑year‑old. This period sparked new workstreams, including Let’s All Talk Mental Health, a series of webinars for parents of teens, and a similar program for menopause that evolved into the Menopause Mandate campaign, featuring public figures such as Mariella Frostrup and Davina McCall.
Flexibility, community and the Women in Work Summit
The pandemic showed that events could be delivered with a freelance‑based, lean model, allowing a network of women balancing family and work to thrive. Recognizing the isolation risk of remote work, she launched the Women in Work Summit in September 2023.
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The inaugural event drew speakers like Channel 4 CEO Alex Mahon, WPP chief Mark Read and former John Lewis chair Dame Sharon White. The summit has since been replicated in New York and presented at Davos alongside NBCUniversal.
She hopes the summit will influence corporate policies, noting that women still earn less than men at four out of five British employers, with an 18.4 % median pay gap persisting for three years, according to the Fawcett Society. “If companies make those changes, they should be able to impact the gender pay and equity gap,” she said.
Future events may combine purpose‑driven content with a flexible workforce, reshaping how organizers think about scale and impact.
Today, Biggs describes her work as “profit for purpose.” She says the shift from food and gardening shows to initiatives on fertility, menopause, mental health and women’s workplace equity feels less like a job and more like a mission. “I love that it doesn’t feel like work; it feels good to be part of these movements for change,” she remarked, showing a personal commitment to causes that align with her own life stages.
