Joy to the World of Women Entrepreneurs!

Happy holidays and best wishes for a New Year of happiness in a world of peace.

Let It Snow!

What a beautiful Sunday in Chicago with all the freshly fallen snow. It's a great day to have fun and be as entrepreneurial as possible. Enjoy!

PrimeTime Women

Is that you? Then you will enjoy this book and post.

Do You Hear What iHear?

A good friend and colleague of mine -- Mindy Goodfriend -- is finally reaching the pinnacle of success in terms of what every entrepreneur dreams about: Getting your product featured on QVC.

Her dream comes true Thursday, December 13th, between 5:00-7:00 p.m. EST. The product, iHear, will be a part of the QVC "Practical Presents" Show hosted by Dan Wheeler.

Steve Nelson, co-founder of Cool & Useful Products (co-founded with Mindy), will be demonstrating iHear on the show.

iHear makes driving safer by amplifying the driver’s voice through the car speakers so that everyone in the car can hear. With iHear you can also make hands-free cell phone calls and play music from your iPod.

How cool and useful is that? Watch and BUY, that's all I have to say! And best wishes to Mindy!

Girls With Goals

As I see it, girls with goals turn into real women entrepreneurs. What do you think?

Supporting Budding Women Entrepreneurs

Over 360 women attended the first National Women's Enterprise Day, in the Mullingar Park Hotel, Mullingar (Ireland), yesterday. Aimed at encouraging and motivating women to start up a business, the event facilitated discussions between aspiring and existing women entrepreneurs about the challenges faced when starting up a business in Ireland.

And I love this quote because it applies to all of us:

Businesses exist to succeed but success can only exist with a strategy and a plan to drive it. I would encourage anyone, be they in business or considering a start-up, to believe in themselves as, with this allied to a well-planned business strategy, anything is possible.

Read the short piece here.

Study Debunks Myths About Women Leaders

A major research study released November 30th by Babson College and The Commonwealth Institute finds that woman-led businesses in Massachusetts are strong engines of economic growth, consistently outperforming national and state growth rates for each of the six years that the study was conducted. The Top Woman-Led Businesses in Massachusetts: 2006 Results study found that woman-led businesses are key drivers of Massachusetts’ revenue and employment as well as strong sources of philanthropic activity. The companies reporting revenues in the survey generated $10.2 billion, and together, all of the companies surveyed employed more than 24,000 people in Massachusetts.

Following are key trends that the study uncovered:

* Woman-run businesses continue to grow.

* Debunking the perception that women predominantly run lifestyle or retail businesses, the CEOs in the study lead companies in every sector of the Massachusetts economy.

* In contrast to the perception that women business leaders are risk averse, women CEOs in Massachusetts on average are proactive and more likely to make bold decisions to maximize potential opportunities.

* Women leaders in Massachusetts stand out from their national peers in their degree of education and professional experience.

* In contrast to cost-benefit approaches to management that rely on cost cutting, women CEOs drive profitability through customer relationships, enhanced products/services and higher margin products.

* Nearly 80 percent of the leaders are personally active in nonprofit, civic and philanthropic organizations.

My favorite quote is by Dr. I. Elaine Allen, Associate Professor of Statistics & Entrepreneurship at Babson College and co-author of the study:

“These businesses are among the highest performing in the state and we can learn a lot from the CEOs leading them. They are focused on building strong businesses for the long-term and have committed themselves and the resources of their organization to growth. They take an entrepreneurial approach to business and are not afraid of taking risks to take advantage of business opportunities.”

Read more and download complete listing of companies and executive summary of the 2006 findings here.

Outlook for Women

Bleak outlook for women looking for top positions in Chicago workplace but for women who wish to start and run a business, the outlook is good.

Here's what Hedy Ratner, co-founder of the Women's Business Development Center in Chicago says:

According to Ratner, more women are starting business for themselves instead of trying to move up the corporate ladder because of the resistance they face there.

Read more.

Why It's Time for Women to Lead in America

A hat tip to Tom Peters for turning me on to Vicki Donlan and her new book which I have not read yet so I cannot comment on its content. However, you may read more about it here.

... Donlan argues that women are poised to shatter the glass ceiling ...

Contributions of Women Business Owners Have Long Gone Understated

A new two-part study by the National Women’s Business Council examining the economic impact of both women-owned and women-led firm reveals that the contributions of women business owners have long gone understated. For the first time, these reports include data on women-led firms, where a woman owns a percentage of the business at least equal to any other owner and where a woman or women managed day-to-day operations.

According to the studies, there were over 1 million women-led businesses generating in excess of $300 billion in revenues in 2002, or about 3% of the U.S. GDP. These firms employed 2.5 million employees and paid nearly $56 billion in payroll. Combined, women-owned and women-led (WOWL) firms totaled over 7.5 million in 2002, employed 9.6 million people and generated nearly $1,240 billion in revenues, or about 12% of the U.S. GDP.

Click here to learn more or here to view both reports.

Work Life Balance

I am so tired of issues pertaining to work life balance for women at the top of the ladder. Have you ever seen an article, "What It's Like for Men At the Top of the Ladder? Is work-family balance possible?"

Why can't we focus on just getting things done? Isn't that what entrepreneurship is all about?

It's Not a Glass Ceiling,

It's a Sticky Floor: Free Yourself From the Hidden Behaviors Sabotaging Your Career Success.

I served as a panelist today on the topic of "Going Global with Your Idea" at the Ninth Annual Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital Conference at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship. When I was done with the program, I visited their bookstore and found all sorts of new books that I was unaware of.

It's Not a Glass Ceiling, It's a Sticky Floor is one of them. Looks interesting. Haven't read it yet. Check it out.

Here's what Publishers Weekly says:

Forget the old boys' club: women are the ones holding themselves back from top-level career success, advises Shambaugh, president and CEO of consulting firm Shambaugh Leadership. Though more businesswomen are in successful positions of power, they are still lagging behind men at the highest levels: more than a third of Fortune 500 managers and more than half of those with multidisciplinary master's degrees are women, yet women hold only 13% of Fortune 500 CEO positions. This lack of forward motion is due more substantially to women's own career-inhibiting behavior than to cultural impediments, Shambaugh claims. Women are more likely than men to shy away from leadership roles, to get bogged down in perfectionism and to avoid career-boosting changes out of a misplaced sense of loyalty. Through a series of exercises and self-appraisals, Shambaugh guides readers with executive suite aspirations through an evaluation of their own behaviors and skills, gauging which serve their ambitions and which are holding them back. Emphasizing strategic relationships, communication and the elements of executive presence, she writes in an encouraging tone with a refreshing lack of blame, making this a satisfying read for women stuck in middle management limbo.

This is definitely not a read for women entrepreneurs or women business owners. We know better.

All The More Reason To Become An Entrepreneur

When Valerie Frederickson, a Silicon Valley human-resources consultant, heard Hillary Clinton assert that she could "take the heat" after getting pummeled by opponents in a recent debate, she recalled the times in her own career when a roomful of men disrespected her.

Once, at a national sales meeting for a large construction-products company, a male colleague passed around photographs of her in a bikini that he'd secretly taken on a prior business trip. "Instead of quitting, I focused on being better, on outselling the guys three-to-one," says Ms. Frederickson, who later founded her own firm, Valerie Frederickson & Co.

This is why we started this blog. Go Valerie! Stop worrying about gender and move on to doing your own thing.

Global Entrepreneurship

U.S. Commerce Department and Kauffman Foundation announce public-private partnership on entrepreneurship! The new web resource and symposia will advance entrepreneurship and economic growth in United States and throughout world.

What's Ahead In Our Brave New Cyberworld

See for yourself. But it definitely applies to global entrepreneurs. My favorite part of this post for the Small Business Trends blog is the Express Yourself video. After all, isn't that what we are doing everyday as women entrepreneurs?

Five Ways Working Mothers Can Carve Out Some 'Me-Time'

Contrary to what this article purports, I believe all women, whether employed at BIG companies or running their own show (business), should create a:

"to stop" list!

Now go carve out time to carve your pumpkin. HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

Giving Notice

Giving Notice: Why the Best and Brightest are Leaving the workplace and How You Can Help Them Stay by Freada Kapor Klein appears to be an eye-opening book (haven't read it yet) filled with tell-it-like-it-is approaches for solving the current imbalance and challenges us to change our hidden biases in the workplace.

It should be required reading for all corporate folks in top executive positions and especially for those who head up HR or diversity responsibilities! After all, we want to understand why more and more people are escaping corporate America for entrepreneurship.

Freada Kapor Klein (San Francisco, CA) is an internationally noted consultant and diversity expert. She has been quoted in the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and on the Today show, Nightline, and NBC Nightly News.

Does Birth Order Matter On Becoming An Entrepreneur?

Do you think it matters whether you are first-born or last (the baby of the brood) when it comes to becoming an entrepreneur?

According to Jeffrey Kluger in a Time magazine article, he thinks it does. It's murky but the conclusion is such that birth order affects fundamental personality traits and we all know that certain characteristics such as the ability to sell something and to take on well-thought-out risks are vital to becoming a successful entrepreneur.

Of all the things that shape who we are, few seem more arbitrary than the sequence in which we and our siblings pop out of the womb. Maybe it's your genes that make you a gifted athlete, your training that makes you an accomplished actress, an accident of brain chemistry that makes you a drunk instead of a President. But in family after family, case study after case study, the simple roll of the birth-date dice has an odd and arbitrary power all its own.

I am the youngest of four children and definitely fit the bill on what Kluger says on later-borns also are more willing to take on risk (I am the only entrepreneur within the family). For instance, research by Ben Dattner, a professor at New York University, shows that firstborn chief executives prefer to make incremental improvements, while later-born CEOs are more likely to make transformational changes.

Read more here and feel free to weigh in with your thoughts. Curious to know whether you agree or disagree based on your birth order or that of others who you track.

No Room for Entrepreneurs

I saved this clip, "No Room Room for Entrepreneurs" by Mary Anastasia O'Grady published in the Wall Street Journal October 8th (available only to subscribers but I just found a reprint of it online at the Hispanic American Center for Economic Research) because I have always been a fan of the work of economist Joseph Schumpeter (1883-1950). He was one of the most brilliant minds who ever lived, and had an electrifying personality to go along with it. Without his knowledge, we would never have understood the concept of what it means to be an entrepreneur.

Schumpeter felt entrepreneurs are not moved by a wish to grow rich but rather the desire and will to conquer, to prove oneself superior to others and to succeed by utilizing one's energy and ingenuity to make something progressive happen -- not for the sake of success alone. I really believe in that theory.

But back to O'Grady's fine opinion piece.

In a speech last year to European finance ministers in Vienna, Mr. Schramm explained Schumpeter's fears: He "worried that entrepreneurial capitalism would not flourish because the bureaucracies of modern government and big corporations would dampen innovation -- the process of 'creative destruction' would be too ungovernable for a modern, Keynesian-regulated economy to tolerate." As a result, Mr. Schramm said, Schumpeter thought that "the importance of entrepreneurs would fade over time as capitalism sought predictability from governments who would plan economic activity as well as order social benefits."

Schramm is president of the Kauffman Foundation of Entrepreneurship.

What do you think? Agree? Disagree?

How To Get A Better Handle On Your Customer Base?

If you're a BIG company, put more women on your board! Why? Because your company will perform better. Read more here.