Birthing the Elephant: The Woman's Go-for-It Guide to Starting and Growing a Successful Business

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Having a business isn't really about control, but I get to design my own destiny. -SUZANNE LYONS

You're ready to strike out on your own. Finally, you're going to do work that you love-work that reflects your personality and passions and is in harmony with your family's needs-and, oh yes, you're going to make lots of money while you're at it! It's time to run your own show. You've paid your dues. You've earned this chance, haven't you?

Come down from that castle in the air for just a minute! It's true that being your own boss offers many potential rewards. But it will also make some startling new demands on you: the need to do more with less, assume unfamiliar risks, wear many hats, and, at least for a while, give up the trappings of success. Still want in? Of course! We all do.

In making this decision, you've set an ambitious but totally achievable goal. All around you, women are reinventing themselves as entrepreneurs and transforming their personal visions into fulfilling work. Every sixty seconds, five women launch new ventures somewhere in the united States. That adds up to more than seven thousand start-ups per day-and more than 2.5 million a year. Astounding, isn't it?

What's fueling this surge in women-owned start-ups? First and foremost, there's the turbocharged internet, which has boosted small-business owners' power and reach in amazing ways. In just a few short years, the Web has triggered a small-business explosion by creating dynamic new sales and marketing channels-and providing niche sellers with easy access to millions of niche buyers. It's also leveled the playing field by enabling small businesses to compete for profits and court customers on a 24/7 basis. One entrepreneur described the awesome experience of standing in an internet cafe in Hong Kong, watching her website pop up-and realizing that at that very moment she could order her product halfway around the world from her home-business base in Orlando!

The internet is also a vast ocean of information, with many an island of advice created especially for entrepreneurial women. Online "e-zines," networking groups, funding sources, training tools, and market data are all just a quick click away. These resources offer not just valuable facts and figures but also a sense of community: today, women-owned businesses are building support systems that are both vibrant and enormously diverse.

Stage-of-life shifts are also stoking the entrepreneurial engine. If fifty is the new forty, then there are vast numbers of women who have years of productive, high-speed living ahead of them. As they ponder fresh ideas about how to spend that time, many baby boomers who've made their mark in corporate jobs are exploring new work options more attuned to their changing self-images and aspirations. You may be one of them yourself!

All this growth creates enormous clout: today, as never before, women are attracting attention and resources from major companies who want their goodwill and, more important, their business. To woo women entrepreneurs, these companies are offering seed funding, running conferences, and showcasing the success stories of women business owners. This intense corporate interest is great news for you. all in all, there's never been a better time to launch your start-up.

Winning the Small-Business Mind Game

Despite the promising climate for entrepreneurs, the realities of small-business ownership remain as daunting as ever. According to the U.S. Small Business administration, one-third of all new ventures won't survive their first two years and more than one-half won't survive through year four. What separates those who make it from those who don't? You might think it's money. Most people do. While that's a big factor, it's not the biggest one. We've spoken to top entrepreneurs and small-business experts all across the country, and most people in the trenches agree that the real key to success is winning the small-business mind game.

Succeeding takes more than courage and business savvy. It also takes a whole new mind-set. To survive a start-up, you need to learn how to think and act like an entrepreneur.

In making this move, you're not just changing your job, or changing your lifestyle, or changing careers. You are changing your identity. At a stroke, your office, your title, a regular paycheck, the rhythm of your workday, the deadlines, the business lunches, the built-in support system-are gone. Suddenly, you're on your own: everything begins and ends with you.

Unless you can cultivate an entrepreneurial approach, even the strongest business plan and rock-solid expertise won't be enough to ensure that your enterprise survives and thrives. And unless you can find the inner strength to rebound from the setbacks you'll meet, you'll find yourself down for the count no matter how promising your new venture is. Moments of doubt can be triggered by the loss of a client, a product disaster, or the incredible shrinking bank balance that plagues most start-ups.

How you respond to challenges like these makes all the difference to your success or failure. You can either collapse in a heap or find the staying power to land on your feet. This is the most demanding aspect of making a small business work-pushing past those times when you feel overwhelmed and everything seems to be falling apart.

Different Paths, Shared Goals

The gifted women you'll come to know in these pages all have different backgrounds and have traveled different roads in building their businesses. Yet we found four themes running through their stories:

1. Seizing the moment: Almost all the women we spoke with experienced a sense of urgency once they committed to launching. When the drive to strike out on their own gathered momentum, it seemed to push them forward. Something clicked, something cracked, something sprang inside them-and they simply had to make a move.

2. Pursuing personal growth: The women we interviewed expressed a strong commitment to work as a way of achieving personal fulfillment. In many cases, they had found the conventional career paths they were on to be too narrow or sluggish. When opportunities for growth didn't exist, their jobs quickly lost their luster-even if they were quite lucrative. In response, they felt compelled to challenge and stretch themselves in new ways.

3. Balancing work and life: Harmonizing values in their business and personal lives emerged as a key driver for many of the women we interviewed. Some of them felt drained by inflexible work situations and conflicts with family priorities. Others became disenchanted when their personal values and those of their employers proved to be seriously out of sync.

4. Realizing a vision: Nearly all the women we interviewed talked about building their lives around a vision. For some, this vision is clear and easily described: helping new mothers regain their fitness or creating elegant home decor. For others, clarifying their vision is an ongoing challenge-the original concept that inspired their start-up has proved to be a moving target, redefining itself as circumstances change or new markets emerge.

Finding the fulfillment that comes from achieving goals like these won't come easily; you'll have to earn it day by day. Is it worth the effort? absolutely! Are there rewards a small business can give you that a corporate job can't? Absolutely! Running your own show offers you the power to orchestrate all aspects of your work in a way that lets you express your personal values while creating a satisfying and profitable lifestyle. Above all, women who strike out on their own want more freedom and flexibility, according to a national survey by ladies Who Launch, a networking group that runs incubators for entrepreneurs. "Launching is good for self-esteem, creativity, and happiness," observes cofounder Beth Schoenfeldt.

A major small-business study by intuit, a business-software developer, confirms this view. According to its findings, "American entrepreneurship will reflect a huge upswing in the number of women. The glass ceiling that has limited women's growth in traditional corporate career paths will send a rich talent pool into the small-business sector. Among them: 'mompreneurs'-mothers who start part-time, home-based businesses, often with the help of the internet. These personal businesses will be launched by people who may not even consider themselves small-business owners."

What else do women want? Along with freedom and flexibility, two other powerful drivers-the desire for challenge and personal achievement-emerged as the prime motivators cited by two hundred women business owners in an ongoing study conducted by Babson College's Center for Women's Leadership.

"It's clearly about personal achievement and autonomy, which, by the way, is not all that different for men," notes Dr. Nan Langowitz, cofounder of the Center for Women's Leadership and an associate professor at Babson College, which runs the country's top-ranked program for aspiring entrepreneurs. "In many, though not all, corporate settings," adds Dr. Langowitz, "as women progress in their careers, the opportunities they see ahead of them aren't necessarily that exciting-and the trade-offs against their time and compensation may not work. So they choose to create their own businesses, their own opportunities, and their own compensation."

Trading Comfort for Independence

Simply put, going into business for yourself means that you've made a decision to give up comfort for independence: you are choosing to forgo security for the ability to make decisions that put you at the center of your work life. "Starting a business is like being the general contractor of your own life," says Karen Curro, co-owner of a life is good store. "And, although it's a lot of work," she adds, "it's your life and you're in control versus someone else running it."

It's an empowering, but challenging trade-off. Making the shift from employee to entrepreneur is one of the toughest career-and life-changes imaginable. It affects your self-esteem, your family, your finances, your health, your retirement plans, your future, your children's futures, your hopes and dreams, your fears. Shaping an independent work life is, above all, an act of improvisation, one that takes both courage and ingenuity. Although this way of working offers enormous flexibility, it won't give you total control over your time and resources. Especially during your start-up phase, your business controls you-you don't control the business.

There's also an enormous "cultural" gap between working for a corporation and working for yourself. It's a lot like the difference between sleeping in a house and living in a tent. In a corporation you have all the comforts of home: people to confer with, support from other divisions, an office, perks, and a travel budget. In a small business, you're camping out: patching together new work patterns, watching your budget like a hawk, making things up as you go, pushing yourself to get the next client or make the next call.

"Are you willing to give up that beautiful four-color copy machine that automatically collates and staples?" asks Cathy Kerns, the founder of Style Sticks, when she speaks about small business. "Are you willing to give up a supply room that has anything you could ever need? Are you willing to give up the casts of thousands there to support you and cover your back at all times? Just how much are you willing to give up that you've come to love and adore about the corporate world-and take for granted? The infrastructure of a corporation is very hard to live without if you've been supported by it for a long time. So, stop and think about that copy machine!"

Along with these practical concerns, emotional challenges and worries often move front and center when you start a new business. You may experience loneliness and the feeling that you're no longer part of the business mainstream. Isolation is one of the biggest dangers that many entrepreneurs face: they have to force themselves to get out, network, be visible, and promote their ventures. Then, of course, there's the Big M: money. Anxiety about holding everything together financially is a major issue. If you're still a corporate employee or between jobs, then all the concerns raised here are ones that you'll need to think long and hard about. Crafting an independent, self-structured life may sound romantic, but will this path really meet your needs, both professionally and personally, not just today but six months from now? What about in five or ten years? is this a work option that makes sense for you-one that you're prepared to commit your time and talents to?

Running a Small Business: A Yen for Yin and Yang

If there's one thing we learned from our interviews, it's that if your psyche has a cold, your business will sneeze! Time and again, your strengths and weaknesses will be exposed and tested-especially in the early days of your start-up. No one knows this better than Roxanne Coady, the founder of R. J. Julia Booksellers, an award-winning independent bookstore and a beloved landmark in Madison, Connecticut.

"When you start a small business," Roxanne observes, "you are holding up a mirror to yourself. There's nowhere to hide. If you have a problem, you can't blame it on the shareholders. You can't blame it on your boss. You can't blame it on the corporate culture. You actually have less freedom than if you had a job. But you have a lot of autonomy: you can independently make decisions that impact your work or your family life. When you have your own business, it's all about the yin and the yang, the ups and the downs. The good news is you have autonomy. The bad news is you're accountable. The good news is you've got, not freedom, but choices. And the bad news is you're going to have to live with the repercussions of your decisions."

What You'll Need to Succeed

to get your business up and running, you'll need to see yourself as the composer of your own life-someone who can orchestrate a satisfying whole out of the unexpected events, disruptions, and emotional intensity that pursuing an independent work life involves. You're going to have to be unstoppable! if you hit an obstacle, you're going to have to go over, around, under, and through it. What other inner resources will you have to tap? here's a brief look at some of the essentials you'll need in your start-up survival kit.

PASSIONATE COMMITMENT TO YOUR BUSINESS IDEA

If the real-estate mantra is "Location, location, location," then the entrepreneurial mantra is "Passion, passion, passion!" Do what you love and love what you do: we heard this time and again from the women we interviewed. If you are lukewarm or conflicted, then think twice about taking this road. Without a deeply rooted belief in the importance of your venture and its potential for success, your business is not likely to thrive and probably won't survive.

"Having talent was important for me," observes Crystal Johnson, founder of Sienna at home, "but the marriage of talent with passion is what has kept me going. It's passion that drives persistence. If you're passionate about something, you're just not going to give up on it. And it will not give up on you either! There have been times when I've tried to walk away from design, I really have, and it just keeps coming right at me! There have been times where there are doors closed or obstacles come up, and instead of stopping or turning or retreating, I just go around them or find a different way." Oassion is the fuel that propels successful start-ups; without its power, you'll quickly lose momentum when you hit a roadblock; with it, you can overcome whatever obstacles you encounter. "In any type of entrepreneurial venture, if you're truly passionate, how can you possibly fail?" asks Dr. Rob Gilbert, a peak performance coach. "Look at what you're competing against! You know the 80-20 rule: 20 percent of employees do 80 percent of the work; 20 percent of salespeople make 80 percent of the sales. Most people aren't passionate; their heart isn't in it, they're not willing to do more than expected. Even many entrepreneurs are in business, but they're not into it-they're not totally committed. Or they may be into it for the short term, but not the long term."

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Excerpted from BIRTHING the ELEPHANT by KARIN ABARBANEL BRUCE FREEMAN Copyright © 2008 by Karin Abarbanel and Bruce Freeman. Excerpted by permission.
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