Patricia Zeegers

Patricia Zeegers has spent more than three decades building the structures that let women lead without burning out underneath their own ambition.

She began her career at Nike, where she spent over ten years across the EMEA region, working within the company's HR function on programs and systems supporting employees across borders. The work taught her something she has carried into every role since: systems, not willpower, are what let people and organizations perform under pressure.

In 2006, she left the Netherlands for Barcelona and built an independent consulting practice, working as a strategic advisor to founders and leaders across more than 50 small and medium-sized businesses in manufacturing, healthcare, and the non-profit sector. She also took on interim leadership roles directly inside organizations in transition, stepping into HR, project management, and managing director positions across businesses navigating growth, restructuring, or change. Each role asked the same question: what structure does this organization need so it can keep moving without depending on one person to hold it together.

Alongside her consulting work, Patricia built a parallel career inside the Professional Women's Network (PWN), a global platform dedicated to advancing women's leadership and entrepreneurship worldwide. She served as President of PWN Barcelona, and later as PWN Global's Non-Executive Director for Entrepreneurship, leading initiatives designed to support women entrepreneurs around the world and advance the network's vision of gender-balanced leadership.

That throughline, structure as the thing that makes ambition sustainable, is also what drew her toward the women she now serves at a different stage of life. Patricia began to notice a pattern across the women she worked with: accomplished professionals, often in their forties, fifties, and beyond, who had spent decades building other people's organizations and were now ready to build something of their own, frequently with a social or community purpose at its core. What they lacked wasn't capability. It was structure, credible guidance, and a community that took their ambitions seriously rather than offering them inspiration in place of a plan.

That observation led her to co-found EOS Academy, currently at pre-seed stage, built specifically to support mid-career women across Europe in designing and launching social ventures with clear structure from the outset. Where many programs for women entrepreneurs lean on motivation, EOS Academy leans on frameworks: tested models for evaluating whether an idea addresses a genuinely neglected need, whether it changes who holds power or voice in a system, and whether it is built to last rather than to burn out the people carrying it.

Patricia now works across three related roles: as a strategic advisor and non-executive board member to founders and leaders who have outgrown the informal structures that got them started; as co-founder of EOS Academy; and as a member of European Women on Boards, continuing the governance work she began at PWN. Across all three, her focus stays the same. She designs the architecture, decision rights, ownership, and operating systems, that lets ambition outlast the person who started it.

Patricia is Dutch, has lived in Barcelona since 2006, and works across English, Dutch, and Spanish. She is a long-standing advocate for the UN's Sustainable Development Goal on gender equality, with a particular focus on the role women's entrepreneurship plays in building more resilient economies across Europe. A central part of that commitment is ensuring women become financially self-reliant, both during their working years and into retirement, rather than dependent on structures built around someone else's career. Through Global Entrepreneurship Week, she and EOS Academy co-founder Dr. Eleftheria Egel are bringing that same commitment to mid-career women ready to turn what they have built in their careers into ventures that serve others.