The corporate menopause engine — what we're building and how
Gemma, this is the overview Ade promised: what we're actually offering employers, who we're reaching out to, how, and where things stand today. Not the operational detail (hundreds of individual email drafts) — just the shape of the thing.
What we're delivering
A ladder from a single doctor-led hour up to a full compliance package — priced top-of-market on purpose, because the premium is carried by two things no competitor combines: Gemma is a GP and a surgeon (MRCS MRCGP), and the higher tiers hand the employer a written doctor's contribution to their statutory paperwork, not just a training session.
1 · The Awareness Hour
60-minute doctor-led all-staff session, live Q&A, take-home guide, certificate of delivery.
2 · The Half-Day
2-hour Manager Masterclass + 1-hour all-staff session + a written doctor's note for their action-plan file.
3 · The Compliance Package
Everything in Tier 2 + a 90-minute working session with HR drafting their actual menopause action plan, with Gemma's written review.
Executive Briefing
45-minute board-level session — the risk picture and the business case, pitched at leadership rather than the whole floor.
Menopause Champion course
1-day certificate course, cohort of 6–12, building an internal network of trained champions.
Ask-the-Doctor retainer
Monthly doctor drop-in for staff questions — no competitor publicly offers anything at this cadence.
A potential side offering — bundling in Stef Mandirola (HASU High Performance Zen)
Stef is IMTA-accredited in corporate/leadership Zen-meditation and mindfulness coaching, ex-aerospace COO background — genuinely complementary to Gemma's clinical offer (resilience/leadership, not menopause), not a competing service. The idea: Gemma's half-day in the morning, Stef running a resilience/mindfulness session in the afternoon, sold as one full-day booking on one invoice — two named specialists in a day instead of one, which nothing in the competitive set offers.
Real market rates for comparable sessions (published, not guessed): We Are Wellbeing charges £850+VAT for a 2-hour mindfulness/resilience workshop and £1,200+VAT for a 3-hour "wellbeing for leaders" session; HUSTLE+hush charges £2,500+VAT for a half-day. Generic UK speaker-bureau bands for a credentialed but non-celebrity speaker run £2,000-£5,000 for a keynote-style talk, though that's not mindfulness-specific and likely too high a comparator here.
A proposed pricing structure — a starting point to put to Stef, not a confirmed price
| Bundle | Gemma's component | Stef's component (proposed) | Combined client price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Half-Day + Talk | £850 Awareness Hour | ~£650-800+VAT (1hr, in-person) | ~£1,600+VAT |
| Full Day + Session | £1,950 Half-Day | ~£950-1,200+VAT (2-3hr afternoon) | ~£2,950+VAT |
Stef's proposed rates read directly off We Are Wellbeing's published 2hr (£850) and 3hr (£1,200) figures, priced slightly under since she'd be the second specialist on a shared day rather than the sole booking. Combined prices rounded to a clean number rather than the exact sum — easier for a buyer to say yes to a round figure.
How the money could actually split — three real options to offer her
- Referral fee. Stef sets and keeps her own rate, invoices the client (or DoctoriumGP) directly. DoctoriumGP adds a coordination margin on top — typically 10-15% in this kind of introduction arrangement — for curating the pairing and running the client relationship. Lowest risk for Stef, cleanest for DoctoriumGP's own commercial model (the same curation-margin logic already used for the supplier catalogue).
- Even split of the bundle premium. Both keep their standalone rate, and any uplift from selling the bundle above the simple sum of both prices (the "two specialists in a day" premium) is split 50/50.
- No formal split yet. Each mentions the other informally, no shared invoice, no commission — matches the "audience swap" option above and costs nothing to start given you two are already friends.
None of this is confirmed — it's the actual proposal to put in front of Stef when Phase 2 starts, not a live offer. Her real rate, and which of the three structures she'd want, has to come from that conversation.
Who we're reaching out to — two genuinely different segments
These need different messages because the legal position is different, so we're running them as two separate lanes rather than one blended list.
Segment A — the legally-obliged tier (250+ staff)
From 2027, UK employers with 250+ staff must publish a menopause action plan. We built a national list of companies already showing some public signal — Menopause Friendly accreditation, the Menopause Workplace Pledge, or a wellbeing award — because a warm, signal-based approach converts better than pure cold outreach.
Segment B — the proactive tier (50-249 staff, medium-sized)
These companies have real budget but no legal deadline forcing them, so the pitch has to work on genuine risk, not compliance pressure. We proved this with a real, current case: a small Petersfield beauty salon (5 staff, not 250) was just ordered to pay £32,000 in a menopause-related tribunal. That risk applies to a 60-person company exactly as much as a 6,000-person one.
Two parts to this segment: a small warm group (7 companies who've already shown public interest — pledge signatories, wellbeing awards) and a much larger cold pull built from official Companies House data, filtered to medium-sized, legitimate limited companies only.
How we're actually reaching them — a sequence, not one email and hope
One email with no follow-up gets roughly a 9% reply rate. A properly spaced 4-email sequence gets roughly 27%, because 55% of all replies come from the follow-ups, not the opener — most people don't reply to the first thing that lands in their inbox, however good it is. So every company on both lists gets a real sequence, not a single shot.
| Touch | Day | Angle |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 0 | The risk — a real, current tribunal case |
| 2 | 3 | A different angle — the manager-conversation statistic |
| 3 | 8 | What it actually is — format, content, and Gemma's own video |
| 4 | 15 | Breakup — a one-line reply (1, 2 or 3), then we stop and honour it |
Each email stands on its own — someone who ignored touch 1 might reply to touch 3 for a completely different reason. Subject lines are deliberately short and plain ("equality act," "manager training") rather than salesy, because that's what actually gets opened; the system tells them apart from real business mail by which address sent it, not by guessing at the subject.
GEMMA_OUTREACH_VIDEO_SCRIPT.md), one setup and one take, phone is fine. The line only appears in the email once the real video exists — nothing goes out with a placeholder or a broken link.
Personalised where we have a real hook (their accreditation, their pledge, their award); where we don't, it leads on the tribunal case instead, honestly, rather than pretending a connection that isn't there. Every ask is a low-friction reply, not a meeting request — "worth a two-line reply?" converts better cold than "worth 15 minutes?" does.
A connection request with a short, non-salesy note, run alongside the email to the same person — reaching someone on two channels roughly doubles the odds of a reply without doubling the pitch.
The actual emails — every touch, not just the opener
Rebuilt via a research-grounded workflow (real cold-email craft research, 5 competing drafts, 3 independent judges incl. a compliance-lawyer pass on the Footlaffs case) after two solo attempts were rightly rejected as weak. Names the actual defendant deliberately — the lawyer-judge rated this the most credible, proportionate way to use a real case, over hiding behind "a salon."
Touches 2 and 4, and the full copy for the signal-rich sequence, are in the working kit — this page shows the shape, not the whole document.
The competitive landscape — nine providers checked, one real threat
This is the actual research, not a summary of it — audited 16 Aug, deepened 25 Aug, re-checked 28 Aug (nothing material has moved since). Full source citations and the complete teardown live in the working kit if you want to go line by line.
| Provider | Delivered by | Price (public) | The gap |
|---|---|---|---|
| Menopause Friendly / Henpicked | L&D/comms specialists — no clinicians named | Not public | Biggest client roster in the market (100+ logos) but sells an accreditation badge and generic e-learning, not clinical authority. |
| My Menopause Centre | Clinic doctors (roster, not named) | Not public | Closest structural comparator — but training is an add-on to a telehealth business, no manager-masterclass or action-plan-drafting product. |
| Online Menopause Centre | 4 named GPs (rotating) | £650/hr masterclass, from £399 half-day | Genuinely doctor-led and roughly a third of our price — but a multi-doctor clinic brand, not one named specialist. |
| Peppy | Nurses, app-based | Not public, per-seat SaaS | Always-on individual access sold against the benefits/EAP budget line — different budget, not really a rival for our slot. |
| Balance@Work (Newson Health) | Team-delivered, MD-led — not Newson personally | Fully consultative — zero public pricing anywhere | The one worth watching closely — see the teardown below. |
| Manchester Menopause Hive | 1 GP | £450/hr, £950/half-day | Thin digital presence, no visible case studies — easy to out-position on credibility and content depth. |
| Spiced Pear Health | 2 BMS-accredited specialist doctors | Not public | Markets on the identical wedge we use (clinicians, not trainers) — proof the differentiator sells, not a reason to avoid it. |
Nobody on this table combines a single named clinical authority with a productised statutory action-plan deliverable. Every competitor's compliance angle is an accreditation badge or a generic framework — HR-policy language, not a doctor personally co-authoring the document. That combination is the wedge nothing else here has.
Balance@Work — the one real threat, taken seriously
Launched July 2026, backed by Louise Newson's platform. Run day-to-day by Sarah Davies (Newson's sister, not a clinician), drawing on Newson Health's wider clinician bench rather than Newson personally.
Where they're genuinely stronger
- Inbound, not outbound. Newson's ~172k Instagram and national TV rotation generate unsolicited enquiries. We run entirely on cold outreach into a finite list.
- An app in every deal. The Balance app (1M+ installs, 4.8/5) ships as employee-facing "proof of value" from day one — we have no equivalent yet.
- Not bottlenecked on one clinician's diary. MD-led delivery means they can scale faster than a model built entirely around one person's calendar.
- Fast logo pull. Four large national names (Met Police, Wates, DAC Beachcroft, Diageo) within weeks of launch.
Where we're genuinely stronger
- A named clinician actually shows up. They publish zero delivery clinicians anywhere — an anonymous-team model wrapped in Newson's personal brand. Gemma delivers personally, and is both GP and surgeon — a combination no competitor in this table holds.
- Published pricing vs total opacity. Every one of their calls-to-action routes to "book a discovery call." Ours are on the table from the first email.
- A real deliverable. Their "workplace assessments" promise a vague "evidence-based approach" with no defined output. Ours produces an actual written doctor's contribution to the statutory action plan.
- The segment they're not chasing. Their four named clients are all 1,000+-employee national organisations — no SME, no East Midlands employer, no NHS trust. That's exactly where we're aimed first, and it's currently uncontested.
One honest gap surfaced re-checking this on 28 Aug: two smaller GP-led providers — Menopause Care (Dr Naomi Potter) and Stretching The City (Dr Lucie Ormerod) — weren't in the original 16 Aug sweep. Neither shows any recent launch or funding signal; they read as pre-existing, smaller players rather than new entrants, but they haven't been individually assessed yet. Flagging rather than hiding it — that's next on the list, not done.
A third channel — reaching many buyers at once, not one email at a time
Everything above is 1:1 outreach. We checked whether there's somewhere the actual buyer (HR/People/Wellbeing professionals) already gathers, where getting in front of them once reaches many at once. Most of what sounded promising turned out to be a dead end — worth showing the honest picture, not just the win.
Checked, and ruled out
Menopause Workplace Pledge / Henpicked — no provider entry point exists beyond a generic contact form. Henpicked is actually a direct competitor (training since 2016), not a channel in.
LinkedIn Groups — confirmed dead industry-wide since 2019, even the 697k-member ones.
SOM, IOSH, CIPD's own conference — real bodies, but gated, wrong audience, or no open door without an existing relationship.
REBA — Reward & Employee Benefits Association
Free membership, an active public webinar programme, and — this is the part that matters — they've already run a free World Menopause Day webinar featuring Kathy Abernethy (ex-chair, British Menopause Society) and Deborah Garlick (Henpicked). There's a proven, working precedent for exactly this kind of expert session. Reaches HR/reward/wellbeing professionals nationally in one sitting, for the cost of one pitch email.
Two smaller, lower-effort options too — actually drafted, not just named:
A fourth lane — wellness businesses, as a partnership channel, not a sale
A national pull of UK Pilates/yoga studios and wellness businesses (21,124 companies, Active Ltd/LLP/PLC, harvest in progress). Decided angle: these businesses don't buy corporate compliance training, so this was never going to be the same pitch as the employer lists — it's a no-cost partnership ask, not a sale. Their client base is the exact demographic; the pitch trades on that directly.