Female Entrepreneurs Go Beyond “Cookies and Crafts”

 

In the 1990′s, if you asked most women business owners what their dreams were, they’d say they just want to be able to support themselves and their families. The times have changed. Today, women have bigger dreams and seek to grow their businesses to the maximum level. However, many are still saddled with an outdated perception about their roles in business and contributions to the economy, despite tremendous growth over the past decade.

 

The old perception is that women-led and -owned businesses are micro-enterprises; companies run out of the home with fewer than five employees. But most women outgrew the “cookies and crafts” stereotype a long time ago, and have their sights set on bigger goals. Many have found success in industries like technology, mining, and construction.

Progressive thinking is being pushed forward by new data that showcases the undeniable impact of women-led and -owned businesses on the economy. Consider these datapoints:

• American Express OPEN’s latest Growing Under the Radar report details just how strong these businesses have been over the past decade. Perhaps the most surprising data is that women-led and -owned businesses experienced 57% growth in revenue of $10 million or above. That is actually a growth rate of 47% more than their male counterparts. This data is even more impressive in the context of a down economy: women-led and -owned businesses continued to grow throughout the recession, as companies around the world had to tighten their belts to weather the storm. The same report indicates that health care, social assistance, and education are industries in which the growth of women’s ownership has been the strongest.
• The membership of the Women Presidents’ Organization (WPO), a nonprofit peer-advisory group for women with $2MM-plus gross revenue, itself accounts for $19BN in aggregate revenue and over 142,000 jobs, stemming directly from its 1,700+ female business leaders. In the WPO, the largest number of businesses are in manufacturing and distribution and 25% of members generate over $10 million annually.
• Forbes called 2013 the “Year of the Female Founder.” As female entrepreneurship gains steam, interest from venture capitalists will grow as well. There are now a number of investment groups, like Golden Seeds, that specialize in funding and empowering women-led businesses.

It makes sense that we’re seeing such a tremendous growth rate for women-led and -owned businesses at this particular time in history. In 1977, only 4.5% of privately held businesses were owned by women. Those businesses were mainly in fashion, fitness and beauty. Today, the greatest number of multimillion-dollar women-owned businesses are in wholesale trade (20%), finance/insurance (12%), and transportation/warehousing (11%).

Over the last decade, women-led and owned businesses generating more than $1 million have grown 31%. That number would be even greater if businesses owned 50/50 by male and female partners and businesses with financial investors were included in census data.

With so many women-led and -owned businesses reaching such lofty benchmarks in the last decade, the stereotypes about female business leaders are thankfully beginning to wear thin. As more women ascend the corporate ladder or build their own businesses from the ground up, they’ll bring even visibility to the success of women throughout business.

Dr. Marsha Firestone

Dr. Marsha Firestone is Founder and President of the Women Presidents’ Organization (WPO), started in 1997 as a peer advisory organization connecting women who own multi-million dollar companies. She is also the Founder and President of the Women Presidents’ Educational Organization, dedicated to creating increased access to business opportunities for Women’s Business Enterprises (WBEs).

The Basics of Crowdfunding

What it is: Crowdfunding is about persuading individuals to each give you a small donation -- $10, $50, $100, maybe more. Once you get thousands of donors, you have some serious cash on hand.

This has all become possible in recent years thanks to a proliferation of websites that allow nonprofits, artists, musicians -- and yes, businesses -- to raise money. This is the social media version of fundraising.

There are more than 600 crowdfunding platforms around the world, with fundraising reaching billions of dollars annually, according to the research firm Massolution.

How it works: The most common type of crowdfunding fundraising is using sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo variety, where donations are sought in return for special rewards. That could mean free product or even a chance to be involved in designing the product or service.

It is also possible to use crowdfunding to assemble loans and royalty financing. The site LendingClub, for example, allows members to directly invest in and borrow from each other, with the claim that eliminating the banking middleman means "both sides can win" in the transactions. Royalty financing sites appear to be more rare, but the idea is to link business owners with investors who lend money for a guaranteed percentage of revenues for whatever the business is selling.

The holy grail is to sell company shares or ownership stakes in the company on crowdfunding sites, because it could be like a mini-IPO without the traditional hurdles. In the past, this has only been legal with accredited investors, people who each have more than $1 million in net worth or more than $200,000 in annual income.

The good news is that the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act of 2012 allows stock to be sold to the general public over crowdfunding sites, but as of mid-2013, the SEC was still hammering out the rules.

Upside: Crowdfunding provides another strategy for startups or early stage companies ready to take it to the next level -- such as rolling out a product or service. Before, a business owner was subject to the caprices of individual angel investors or bank loan officers. Now it is possible to pitch a business plan to the masses.

A successful crowdfunding round not only provides your business with needed cash, but creates a base of customers who feel as though they have a stake in the business' success.


Downside: If you don’t have an engaging story to tell, then your crowdfunding bid could be a flop. Sites such as Kickstarter don’t collect money until a fundraising goal is reached, so that’s still a lot of wasted time that could have been spent doing other things to grow the business.

It could be even worse if you meet your goal but then realize you underestimated how much money you needed. A business risks getting sued if it promises customers products or perks in return for donations, and then fails to deliver.

There is also an argument to be made that angel investors and even bank officers provide more than just money. They provide entrepreneurs with needed advice. Business owners miss out on such mentorship when they ignore traditional investors and turn to the crowd.

Here are more factors that can better ensure a successful crowdfunding campaign:
● Have at least a small network of enthusiastic friends and family willing to help get the ball rolling by giving and urging others to give.
● If you’re giving out perks in return for money, make sure the perks are cool.
● Present a serious business plan and an explanation of why the money will take your enterprise to the next level.
● Demonstrate that you have your own skin in the game because of the personal funds you have already poured into the business.
● Include a video pitch and keep it short and concise, with a call to action.
● PBS includes different rewards for different levels of giving; so should you.
● Be prepared to essentially live online, staying active on social media sites, until the crowdfunding campaign is complete.

It Takes Purpose to Become a Billionaire

What do billionaires have in common? What is it that they do better than anyone else? Why do we admire them, or their companies’ products and services, so much?

I’ve spent some time trying to identify common traits in the Forbes list of billionaires and other similar lists of the world’s wealthiest. I’m particularly interested in finding patterns in the types of people whom I respect. It’s less about all that dough they’ve accumulated than about better understanding how and why they made their fortunes.

It turns out there are many ways to make a billion dollars: real estate, investing, gaming and entertainment, retail, technology, and good old-fashioned inheritance. But the most interesting (and most respected) businesses and personalities are also the ones with the strongest and most authentic purposes behind them. My business partner, Mats Lederhausen, was one of the first advocates I knew of purpose-driven business and entrepreneurship. I credit Mats with helping me understand that purpose is neither something soft nor something overly lofty. Instead, purpose is the bigger why of a business. All of us understand the what of any successful business, but what about the why?

While billionaires and their companies are bucket companies by industry (i.e. the what of the company), I believe that there are three categories of purpose that are interesting to observe, and consider which one dominates your company’s mission. Here they are:
1. Making the world more beautiful.
2. Making the world more fun.
3. Making the world more efficient and smart.

1. Making the world more beautiful. These are the people who make us look, eat, and live more beautifully. It is a broad definition of outer and inner beauty. The best are able to make us look and feel good. The beauty category of billionaires includes the larger-than-life fashion figures of Ralph Lauren, Bernard Arnault (of LVMH), and recently minted billionaire Tory Burch. It is actually quite amazing to see how many of the world’s richest come from the fashion, retail, and design worlds. And then there are those who aren’t explicitly in the design, style, or beauty business but nonetheless identify strongly with these themes. Apple, of course, is the poster child for this ethos, as it puts design first for everything from its software to the industrial engineering of products. For Apple, it is not just design that matters — what’s paramount is using design to connect to the user.

Beyond beauty sensed with our sight and touch, there are the founders in this category who have focused on our inner beauty and health. Indeed, there are people like Hamdi Ulukaya (the Turkish founder of Chobani Greek Yogurt) or the founders of a variety of biotech and pharmaceutical firms who have achieved this through focusing on the purpose of healthier ways for us to eat and live.

2. Making the world more fun. One name that springs immediately to mind is Richard Branson. His mission and purpose center around fun and play. Disney is another icon that has redefined the entertainment experience. But perhaps my personal favorite of a billionaire founder who has spread his creative fun around the world is Cirque du Soleil founder Guy Laliberté. Making the world more fun is noble and creates greater happiness for us all. The billionaire founders who get this and who have succeeded in doing so help to put more smiles, more laughter and yes, more fun into a world that is too often dull and mundane. Fun is a good business model — and it does not need to be a billion-dollar enterprise. It is perhaps because it is relatively easy to think of small ways to create fun that it is even more impressive when people such as these are able to scale fun on a massive level.

3. Making the world smarter, more efficient, and more relevant. There are more “knowledge workers” today than ever before. In this world, we have all become familiar with the technology and Internet moguls (e.g. Larry Ellison, Bill Gates, Sergey Brin, and Larry Page) who have helped to make us smarter, faster and more efficient in our daily lives. Doing work via shared Google Docs versus a word processor versus a typewriter — yes, we’ve come a long way. The connected social economy and its companies like Facebook and LinkedIn are all about how we can try to do more, faster. That is, these companies allow us to have more communication moments in ever-shorter time segments. And there are also information and media moguls, like Mike Bloomberg or the Thomson family behind Thomson Reuters, who dominate financial and legal information, respectively, and are viewed as being mission critical to professionals in those fields.

 As these firms enable more, faster, and smarter throughput of information, a challenge will be to maintain relevancy. As more and more information is thrown at us, we are now ironically often seeking less and less of it. And this is perhaps what the next great wave of tech and info billionaires will address — as curators whose purpose will be to find greater meaning, context, and relevancy in this mass information world.

So, while there are many ways to make money, there tend to be some common patterns of higher purpose. The three purposes illustrated here help explain why and how some of the world’s wealthiest have have gotten so rich, and made our lives richer as well. These three purpose categories likely blur at times, and certainly co-exist in terms of the culture and value propositions of the truly great companies. But the take-home lesson is to ask yourself which of these purposes you are willing to strive to become the absolute best at. Companies and founders that make a singular and unwavering commitment to excel along any of these three purpose dimensions not only have the chance to make our lives better, but also to leave an imprint on our culture, on how we view and experience this world. That, and they might just end up as billionaires.

Anthony K. Tjan

Anthony Tjan is CEO, Managing Partner and Founder of the venture capital firm Cue Ball, vice chairman of the advisory firm Parthenon, and co-author of the New York Times bestseller Heart, Smarts, Guts, and Luck (HBR Press, 2012).

Women need to redefine today’s workplace because ‘it’s not working’

It’s time for women to radically change the way they work and to make it more realistic for people to climb the corporate ladder while still caring for themselves and those they love, says Arianna Huffington, editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post.

Women have been through two revolutions: the right to vote and the drive toward workplace equality, she said earlier this week at the Deloitte Women of Influence luncheon series in Toronto.

“The third women’s revolution is about changing the workplace and it is going to be led by women. It’s going to be led by women because you guys designed it and it’s not working,” she said, getting a few laughs from the overwhelmingly female audience.

“When we redefine the workplace, men are going to be unbelievably grateful,” she quipped. “Because right now we equate sleep deprivation with virility.”

After a recent dinner with a man who bragged about getting a mere four hours of sleep the night before, Ms. Huffington wanted to say: “You know what? If you had gotten five [hours] this dinner would have been a lot more interesting.”

“We now operate workplaces that are fuelled by burnout, sleep deprivation, exhaustion – and we’re paying a heavy price,” she said, resulting in anxiety, stress, burnout, destroyed friendships, marriages and families.

Ms. Huffington said we need to redefine how we judge success – beyond just money and power – to include what she calls the third metric, which is our own personal well-being.

When women do that “we will find it easier to break through the glass ceiling,” she said. 

We also need to change our mindset because taking care of ourselves “is not a tradeoff,” she said, and it doesn’t mean that “we’re not as committed to our work, we’re not working as hard.”

Ms. Huffington recounted her own “rude awakening” in 2007, two years after launching The Huffington Post, when she fainted from exhaustion, smacked her head on her desk, broke her cheekbone and needed stitches.

“That started me on this journey of re-evaluating success, our working lives and led to the third metric,” she said. “I’ve never been more effective or productive than when I’ve gotten seven or eight hours of sleep,” or after she meditates or does yoga.

“I’ve found that if I’m in a place of strength and wisdom inside myself, no matter what happens, I can deal with it much more effectively,” she said. “If I’m exhausted, run down, burned out, I’m reactive and that’s when the worst mistakes happen.”

Companies are losing billions each year due to employee stress and absenteeism, and most of that can be prevented, she said. People need to learn how to take care of themselves, reduce their stress, improve their outlook, prioritize their goals and try to enjoy the moment they are in, she said.

“As I get older I realize that, ultimately, you want to enjoy your life – this is not a dress rehearsal,” she said.

The Huffington Post has taken steps to help workers manage stress with yoga classes and two nap rooms in its head office. At first, no one would use the rooms, “nobody would be [caught] dead going into one,” she said, but now they are always full.

“The other day I was walking by one and I saw two people coming out of the nap room,” she said with a chuckle. “And I thought to myself ‘whatever it takes to recharge you. Just don’t tell HR.’”

As women progress in their career, they need to stop being perfectionists and prioritize, she said.

“‘No’ is a complete sentence, did you know that? Not ‘No, because.’ Just ‘No.’ Did you know you can complete a project by dropping it?” she asked, to laughs from the audience.

Ms. Huffington said she always wanted to learn German, but in her forties she realized that it was not a priority, so she struck it off her to-do list. “Any project that you’ve started in your mind drains energy,” she said, and by cutting out things that don’t really matter you “have the energy for the things that you really want to commit yourself to.”

But in order for this revolution to happen, women need to “remake the world in your own image and your own definition of success, so that all of us, women and men, can live our lives with more grace, more joy, more empathy, more gratitude, and yes, more sleep.”

8 Things You Should Not Do Every Day

It's for your own good. Cut these things out of your day and you'll see gains in productivity--not to mention happiness.

If you get decent value from making to-do lists, you'll get huge returns--in productivity, in improved relationships, and in your personal well-being--from adding these items to your not to-do list:

Every day, make the commitment not to:

1. Check my phone while I'm talking to someone.
You've done it. You've played the, "Is that your phone? Oh, it must be mine," game. You've tried the you-think-sly-but-actually-really-obvious downwards glance. You've done the, "Wait, let me answer this text..." thing.

Maybe you didn't even say, "Wait." You just stopped talking, stopped paying attention, and did it.
Want to stand out? Want to be that person everyone loves because they make you feel, when they're talking to you, like you're the most important person in the world?

Stop checking your phone. It doesn't notice when you aren't paying attention.

Other people? They notice.

And they care.

2. Multitask during a meeting.
The easiest way to be the smartest person in the room is to be the person who pays the most attention to the room.

You'll be amazed by what you can learn, both about the topic of the meeting and about the people in the meeting if you stop multitasking and start paying close attention. You'll flush out and understand hidden agendas, you'll spot opportunities to build bridges, and you'll find ways to make yourself indispensable to the people who matter.

It's easy, because you'll be the only one trying.

And you'll be the only one succeeding on multiple levels.

3. Think about people who don't make any difference in my life.
Trust me: The inhabitants of planet Kardashian are okay without you.

But your family, your friends, your employees--all the people that really matter to you--are not. Give them your time and attention.

They're the ones who deserve it.

4. Use multiple notifications.
You don't need to know the instant you get an email. Or a text. Or a tweet. Or anything else that pops up on your phone or computer.

If something is important enough for you to do, it's important enough for you to do without interruptions. Focus totally on what you're doing. Then, on a schedule you set--instead of a schedule you let everyone else set--play prairie dog and pop your head up to see what's happening.

And then get right back to work. Focusing on what you are doing is a lot more important than focusing on other people might be doing.

They can wait. You, and what is truly important to you, cannot.

5. Let the past dictate the future.
Mistakes are valuable. Learn from them.
Then let them go.

Easier said than done? It all depends on your perspective. When something goes wrong, turn it into an opportunity to learn something you didn't know--especially about yourself.

When something goes wrong for someone else, turn it into an opportunity to be gracious, forgiving, and understanding.

The past is just training. The past should definitely inform but in no way define you--unless you let it.

6. Wait until I'm sure I will succeed.
You can never feel sure you will succeed at something new, but you can always feel sure you are committed to giving something your best.

And you can always feel sure you will try again if you fail.

Stop waiting. You have a lot less to lose than you think, and everything to gain.

7. Talk behind someone's back.
If only because being the focus of gossip sucks. (And so do the people who gossip.)

If you've talked to more than one person about something Joe is doing, wouldn't everyone be better off if you stepped up and actually talked to Joe about it? And if it's "not your place" to talk to Joe, it's probably not your place to talk about Joe.

Spend your time on productive conversations. You'll get a lot more done--and you'll gain a lot more respect.

8. Say "yes" when I really mean "no."
Refusing a request from colleagues, customers, or even friends is really hard. But rarely does saying no go as badly as you expect. Most people will understand, and if they don't, should you care too much about what they think?

When you say no, at least you'll only feel bad for a few moments. When you say yes to something you really don't want to do you might feel bad for a long time--or at least as long as it takes you to do what you didn't want to do in the first place.

 

JEFF HADEN learned much of what he knows about business and technology as he worked his way up in the manufacturing industry. Everything else he picks up from ghostwriting books for some of the smartest leaders he knows in business.

Should A University Directly Invest in Student Start-ups?

Stanford recently announced that it will be directly investing in start-ups founded by students. If a company is accepted into a campus incubator and if it raises at least half a million dollars from outside investors, the university will also put money in through its endowments. The investments aren't going to be huge sums, either for the start-ups or for Stanford, whose endowment exceeds the GDP of Jamaica.

I've written extensively about these questions before, and have a long post up on newyorker.com describing Stanford's new policies and the questions surrounding them. The great virtue of the investments is that it will help train students in important life skills: raising money, running companies, creating, building. Stanford students have given the world important companies, like, for example, LinkedIn. (As a disclosure, I'm an alum with a small start-up I helped found called The Atavist.) But here are some of the questions raised:

* Stanford professors often invest in student companies. This creates potential conflicts of interest: could it, for example, affect a student's grades? Coercive power, which professors have, is not a good thing to pair with financial opportunity. Fortunately, this new fund is designed to limit such issues. But it's an issue other schools should examine if they start similar programs.

* Could such a fund encourage students to drop-out? Successful start-up C.E.O.s work all the time at their companies. Could the university promotion of start-ups lead to fewer students graduating, and could that be a bad thing?

* How does intensive university promotion of start-ups change the culture on a campus that has always prided itself on its intellectual diversity?

Silicon Valley has provided the world with extraordinary innovation, and Stanford has always had intensely close relations with Silicon Valley. But these are all important questions and reasons why we should watch this experiment.

Photo: Bloomberg via Getty Images

Posted by:Nicholas Thompson

Generational Astrology - loyalty and job life expectancy

See if the following story is consistent with so much that has been written about Generation X, Y, and Z in the recent past by countless “generational consultants”:

They get restless after a little while in one place,” said an employer. “For the last few years I haven’t counted on keeping the ordinary fellows more than six months. I just let them go and take the next one who is always dropping in.

“Madam, I assure you I could just cross the street tomorrow and be paid as much as you give me.” Selfish, satisfied, and capricious, these young people newly emancipated into economic freedom are seldom idle; they work, but they are marking time on the spot they have reached, for the do not perceive any options desirable enough to lead them beyond those they are now enjoying.”

An enormous amount of ink has been spilled on this topic, usually along with the different characteristics of the Baby Boomers and Generation X, Y, Z, ad nauseam. One reason for this increased attention is there are simply more generations interacting in the workforce today than in the past.

One reason is life expectancy. The average knowledge worker today will outlive their employer, with an average active work life of approximately fifty years compared to the average organizational life of thirty. This translates into the average worker today having many more jobs—and even careers—than those of their ancestors a century ago.

It may be an interesting academic and historical exercise to create lists of the differences between the Baby Boomers, Generation X, Y, and Z, but knowing the personality traits between the generations does not necessarily assist a company in attracting or inspiring its knowledge workers. All of this “generational astrology” has all the explanatory power of asking people their signs—it is an incredibly weak theory.

A more robust explanation for today’s workers—no matter when they were born—is the fact that they are knowledge workers, who are far wealthier than their parents—they grew up in what economist Brink Lindsey calls “The Age of Abundance.”

Wealth provides more options, from extending education, traveling the world, living with parents longer, or simply delaying gainful employment. John Adams, America’s second president wrote:

I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy and they in turn must study those subjects so that their children can study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.”

In an intellectual capital economy there is a far greater range of talents that can be rewarded. America’s best-paid chef, Wolf gang Puck, earned $16 million in 2005 while Takeru “Tsunami” Kobayashi earned more than $200,000 a year for holding the title of the world’s hot-dog eating champion (from The Economist, October 7, 2006: 23-24).

Another crucial difference in today’s workers is they own more of the means of production in their heads than ever before, which gives them enormous market power in the economy. They also understand this fundamental fact better than their predecessors. When I entered the CPA profession, I believed I was a service worker; today’s students understand they are knowledge workers.

Organizations can lament the fact that Generation X, Y, and Z are not as loyal as their parents, but the fact of the matter is loyalty is a two-way street; it must be earned. No business deserves any loyalty, either from its customers or its associates, until it does something to earn it.

Loyalty is not dead in the business world, but a reason to be loyal may be dying in some industries. The real question is, does the organization deserve the loyalty of its workers.

In tribute to Mark Twain’s quip that history may not repeat itself but it does rhyme, the opening story above is from the 1907 book The New Basis of Civilization, by Simon Nelson Patten.

I suppose one generation has always had issues with the next, but it is hardly any reason to treat human beings different. To believe otherwise is to take astrology seriously.Posted by:

 Ron Baker