Pre-launch · A few excellent pilot partners wanted

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Retention, but make it accountable

Keep the women everyone else will try to hire.

Aurum turns overlooked work into visible proof, real sponsorship and numbers Finance can use.

See the method Meet the club

Serious infrastructure · excellent lunches

The talent is already in the building. The receipts should be too.

A note from Arundhati

I had a very good seat for a very annoying pattern.

I worked in economic advisory and then ran a company's numbers as a CFO. Close enough to the rooms where people get chosen to notice who did the work, who described it, and which version travelled.

The pattern was remarkably consistent. A woman delivered something difficult. Someone else found the sentence for it. Guess which one the room remembered.

I wondered whether I was simply irritated. The research was more useful: this had been measured, the usual confidence advice missed the point, and the fix could be designed.

So I built Aurum. Not another programme asking women to become more impressive. Infrastructure that makes impressive work harder to overlook.

Arundhati Babar, Founder

You know this one

A familiar little corporate plot.

She spends eight months on the migration.

Forty teams. No downtime. Nothing breaks.

Someone asks what she has been working on.

She says: I helped out with the migration.

She is not being modest. She cannot see it.

Nobody ever gave her the sentence.

Excellent work. Terrible trailer. We fix the narration.

The research, because obviously

Plot twist: it was never confidence.

The pattern has been measured since 1998. The scoring rules change; the advice to women somehow does not.

02 · The moving bar

The standard shifts when an assertive woman is evaluatedA man is assertiveA woman is assertiveJudged on competenceJudged on how she came acrossthe standard movesSource: Phelan, Moss-Racusin and Rudman, 2008
“Same words. Different speaker. Entirely different career weather.”

We could give her another confidence workshop. Or we could change who carries the story into the room.

Goodwill is lovely. Deadlines are better.

The Ninety.

Four stages. Ninety days. Named commitments. One number at the end. Very little room for enthusiastic vagueness.

Aurum programme premise and methodology.

01 · Seen

Her work is documented as it happens. Outcomes, scope, numbers. A record, not a self-assessment.

02 · Said

She learns to describe it in a sentence another person can repeat accurately. This is the only part that is about her, and it is the part she keeps forever.

03 · Carried

A sponsor with real standing takes named commitments with dates. Who they will speak to, about what, by when.

04 · Counted

Retention, promotion velocity and cost avoided, measured against a matched control group.

Ninety days. Nothing to renew if the number disappoints.

Bring receipts

The Ledger.

A CV asks her to make the case. The Ledger brings the evidence, the witnesses and the follow-through.

  • 01What she delivered, documented at the time rather than reconstructed at review season
  • 02Who vouched for her, by name, and what they committed to
  • 03What she was put forward for, and what happened
  • 04Verified, timestamped, and hers to take anywhere

We are not scoring women. There is nothing wrong with them. We are replacing an unverifiable claim with an evidenced record.

The

OBL

Only Brunches
and Lunches

Where the strategy gets a social life

The Only Brunches and Lunches Club.

The software tracks the promise. The club creates the relationship worth making one for. No awkward networking. No lanyards. No panel called “Finding Your Voice.”

Part A

Why the room is built this way

Opportunity travels along weak ties

The connections that move careers are usually not the close ones. A study of more than twenty million people found relatively weak ties drove job mobility more effectively than strong ones. The person who changes your career is rarely someone you already speak to every week.

Source: Rajkumar and colleagues, Science, 2022
Eating together changes how people cooperate

People who share a meal cooperate more and reach agreement faster than people negotiating with nothing on the table. Shared food is not a social nicety. It measurably changes the outcome.

Source: Woolley and Fishbach, research on shared meals and cooperation
Making something with your hands lowers the stakes of the conversation

Absorbing, repetitive work with the hands reduces stress and quiets self-monitoring. People who are occupied talk more freely than people being watched across a table. This is why our rooms have something in them to do.

Mechanism note: Established finding in occupational therapy and stress research

Side by side beats face to face

Direct conversation carries social pressure, particularly when you are being assessed. Shared activity removes the demand to perform, and people disclose considerably more. A panel discussion produces polite answers. A shared table produces real ones.

Mechanism note: Established finding in social psychology

Part B

What we actually do.

Pottery and ceramics

Hands occupied, eyes down, nobody performing. The most honest conversations we have had happened over a wheel.

Aurum format observation

Painting, loosely supervised

No talent required and none expected. The point is the absorption, not the painting.

Format mechanism: absorption

Herbal oil and scent blending

Scent binds to memory more directly than almost any other sense. People remember the room, and they remember who was in it.

Format mechanism: scent and memory

The long lunch

Curated tables, eight to ten people, deliberately mixed by seniority. No panel. No stage. No badges with job titles on them.

Aurum format design

Good table. Sharp women. Introductions with somewhere to go.

The CFO gets a seat too

Lovely story. Now show us the number.

Every programme produces a retention number. Choose how deeply you want to understand what moved it.

Benchmark · How do we compare?

  • Everything in Diagnostic, plus:
  • Your sponsorship conversion against anonymised peer organisations
  • Sponsor effectiveness ranked across your leadership
  • Year on year movement, tracked across cycles

Diagnostic · Where is it breaking?

  • Everything in Signal, plus:
  • Which rung women stall at, by function and by band
  • Which managers advance people and which quietly do not
  • Where in the ninety days a cycle tends to fail

Signal · Did it work?

  • Retention delta, sponsored cohort against matched control
  • Promotion velocity against your own historical baseline
  • Cost avoided, at your loaded replacement figure

Benchmark requires data from enough organisations to be honest. We will tell you when it is ready rather than sell it before it is.

Sample data

Figures shown inside the Aurum product demo are illustrative, not Aurum customer results.

A polite warning

Not for box-tickers.

Aurum needs senior people willing to put their name to something and be measured on whether they followed through. In organisations where leadership will not commit in writing, or where this is being bought to satisfy a reporting requirement, the programme will produce a disappointing number and we will both have wasted a quarter.

We like a contract. We like an honest number more.

Your table is almost ready

Bring us the women you cannot afford to lose.

Pre-launch. We are looking for a small number of pilot partners who want the number more than the press release.

Pull up a chair