Contemporary from profitable AU$150,000 from a world affect entrepreneurship program that concerned a visit to Paris to just accept an award from Amal Clooney, Australian startup Train Properly provides Startup Each day a lesson in dedication and goal.
“We’ve been working in a very sustained, dedicated method on a deeply intractable drawback,” says Ingrid Sealey, the founder and director of training startup Train Properly.
In 2019, the Perth-based entrepreneur launched Train Properly hoping to offer significant lifelong studying alternatives for lecturers and college leaders trying to enhance their scholar outcomes.
Since then, greater than 2000 lecturers and college leaders, from kindergarten to yr 12 and throughout Australia, have been impacted by the packages, with 83 per cent of members reporting a elevate in scholar tutorial progress because of Train Properly’s Masterclass Collection.
“The lecturers and leaders that we’ve labored with have made unimaginable progress in closing the fairness hole,” she says. “So for a really complicated drawback that’s tough to make headway, we’ve made unimaginable beneficial properties on this house.”
The seed of the concept got here a decade in the past when Ingrid labored for a not-for-profit program to help faculty leaders in deprived communities in Western Australia.
“What we discovered was that there have been a small variety of colleges that had been making nice beneficial properties and the overwhelming majority of faculties weren’t. It wasn’t for lack of effort or dedication or care. It was simply very tough to search out academic interventions that actually made a distinction,” she says. “What turned clear, as soon as we seemed on the analysis… was that it’s going to need to be one thing to do with classroom educating that shifts college students ahead.”
Train Properly and the Cartier Girls’s Initiative
Flash ahead to Could 10, 2023, when Ingrid was considered one of 32 ladies affect entrepreneurs from world wide being recognised on the 16th annual Cartier Girls’s Initiative awards ceremony on the Salle Pleyel live performance corridor in Paris.
After addresses from British barrister and human rights activist Amal Clooney and the CEO and President of Cartier Worldwide, Cyrille Vigneron, Ingrid was named the winner of the Cartier Girls’s Initiative for the Oceania area and given AU$150,000 in grant funding.
“It was a fairly surreal expertise,” Ingrid tells Startup Each day. “I don’t suppose I’ll ever have something fairly like that in my life once more.”
The Cartier Girls’s Initiative is an annual worldwide entrepreneurship program with the aim of offering monetary, social and human capital help to women-owned companies making a social or environmental affect. This system selects winners for every area, with Australia and New Zealand falling within the Oceania class. Three winners are chosen for Oceania, with one taking out the highest prize.
As purposes open for the 2024 Cartier Girls’s Initiative, Ingrid tells us why she utilized.

Fellows and well-known presenters on the sixteenth annual Cartier Girls’s Initiative awards ceremony in Paris on Could 10. Picture: Provided.
“My expertise is that awards and packages which were round for some time get actually good at understanding what makes a significant distinction for the individuals they’re attempting to help,” Ingrid says.
“So there’s work to be carried out as you apply for them and you’re employed by the completely different choice levels. [The Cartier Women’s Initiative] seemed like an award the place that course of would truly be significant to us. So they’d ask me the type of questions that will give me causes to face again and take into consideration the larger image. These alternatives are few and much between whenever you’re so operational and also you’re simply attempting to scale issues shortly.”
Ingrid, who beforehand labored in technique for The Boston Consulting Group and based management program Fogarty EDvance, discovered the choice course of notably helpful. “I began engaged on an software this time final yr and that’s as a result of throughout the completely different software and due diligence phases, we obtained plenty of suggestions in order that was nice,” she says. “I obtained rather a lot out of the method even earlier than we obtained to January.”
From January, the 32 chosen fellows got tailor-made mentoring and training by business leaders, traders and entrepreneurs. Discovering media and communications “scary and intimidating”, Ingrid says teaching in these areas have been game-changing for her personally.
“That’s an exquisite private funding and for our organisation to lean into an area that I may need averted,” Ingrid says. “It’s given me nice confidence in that house.”

Ingrid Sealey is considered one of this yr’s 11 Cartier Girls’s Initiative first-prize winners. Picture: Provided.
Fixing issues with a world group
This system culminated in an government affect management program in Paris run by one of many world’s main graduate enterprise colleges, INSEAD.
“It’s been completely fascinating to unpick entrepreneurship with some real-life case research from what’s taking place in a few of the most enjoyable areas proper now on this planet,” Ingrid says. “That’s the wonderful factor about this international group.”
A significant good thing about this system has been spending time with different ladies entrepreneurs driving constructive change in areas like local weather and well being. “Having the ability to talk about what it means to stability affect and viability with different individuals who navigate these similar challenges in several methods with completely different weightings to profitability versus affect, I feel is essential,” Ingrid factors out.
There’s additionally nonetheless a glass ceiling for ladies affect entrepreneurs to crack. “In society there’s nonetheless an expectation that girls might be extra compassionate, that they are going to be extra societally minded, that they’ll pay extra consideration to any unfavourable externalities of the work that they do, and that they need to simply do this totally free,” Ingrid elaborates.
“I’m very grateful that I get to do work that makes a distinction day by day. However I additionally suppose it’s actually vital that we don’t make that the expectation and area of girls, that each one males are inspired to have the ability to take part in a world the place you could lead with compassion, the place you don’t simply need to optimise for business or profitability causes, that really you’ll be able to take moments in your profession to work for affect on one thing that you’re captivated with that may make a distinction.”
This ties into the obstacles to funding in ladies’s startups as nicely. In 2022, solely three per cent of enterprise capital went to all-women based startups. “We’re usually undervalued, it’s more durable for us to boost capital,” Ingrid says.
Ingrid says the dedication from Cartier to serving to ladies affect entrepreneurs succeed has come from an genuine place, from offering entry to traders to time with Cartier’s personal CEO.
“That stood out for me. [Cartier CEO] Cyrille took plenty of time to spend with us fellows, not simply at public occasions the place it will be ahead going through,” she says. “I really feel like that is one thing that’s held fairly dearly by Cartier from high to backside. I feel meaning one thing to us as fellows who’re additionally managing affect and viability.”
Whereas Western Australia could also be Ingrid’s base, Train Properly’s affect is deepening in New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland. Her objectives are to scale that affect amongst east coast colleges and complicated communities, and share extra learnings with the worldwide group.
For anybody pondering of making use of for the 2024 Cartier Girls’s Initiative, Ingrid has a transparent message. “Even when we hadn’t made it to the tip and change into a finalist, it was already significant to us as an organisation,” she says. “It’s value investing in.”
Are you a feminine entrepreneur in Australia and New Zealand with an affect enterprise? Apply for the 2024 Cartier Girls’s Initiative right here.
This text is dropped at you by Startup Each day in partnership with Cartier Girls’s Initiative.