Entrepreneurship for the Rest of Us: A Conversation About Women's Business Growth

(photo courtesy of Andrew Lee)





I wanted to share this really important post – Response: Sacrifice Your Health for Your Startup - from a woman named Darla Cohen. It illuminates a conversation that I have frequently, and in fact one that I have had the last two days in a row. A conversation about women’s business growth.

She wrote on her husband’s blog (Jason Cohen of A Smart Bear – a blog I like and read a lot) in response to his post: Sacrifice Your Health for Your Startup. Understandably, his post generated a lot of comments and interest, and Darla weighted in to offer a different perspective about her different entrepreneurial experience.

It is a perspective that we are very familiar with and one that tends to be under-reported and under-acknowledged.

We know from sources like the Kaufman Foundation that women-led ventures are smaller, less growth-oriented, and start with less capital than men-owned firms.

People often abhor these statistics and report them in the context of “studies show that women still lag behind men”. It is true, in terms of growth and access to capital women entrepreneurs do lag behind men. I get frustrated about these stories, not because of the lag but because the lag is really not the point. Many women entrepreneurs aren’t concerned about this lag, because it isn’t necessarily reporting on the things that they care about most. Perhaps surprisingly, running businesses similar to their male counterparts is not what all women entrepreneurs want. For some women, growth and sale price are neither the motivating factors nor the markers of success.

Why? Because they have different goals (something we work very hard with our members to be clear about).

Instead of size and scale they may prioritize flexibility and autonomy. And when I say flexibility, I don’t just mean the day-to-day kind, but I am also talking about seasonal and yearly flexibility. Many women I know don’t want their business to be on a growth path that they don’t have control over and want the ability to slow, relocate, or halt their businesses as they need to or want to.

Others may be more concerned with building something that is sustainable in the long-term, that they can run for the next 10 years. For these women working for themselves may be the next step in their career path or a destination that they have been working towards for some time.

And although these women aren’t following the traditionally glorified entrepreneurial path, they are still entrepreneurs and they still run businesses and they still contribute to the economy and still have an impact on their industries and communities. You can distinguish these businesses as lifestyle businesses if that makes you feel better, although to Darla’s point, that phrase does seem to undermine the amount of work and sacrifice that these ventures take. And I can’t tell you how many of these so-called lifestyle business owners I know are self-supporting…a reality that makes running a business a lot less lifestyle-ish.

Now, don’t get me wrong – I hate generalities and I recognize and work daily with women who don’t fit this description, women who are focused on size and scale and who are building great companies in the process. And there are fabulous resources out there (though not enough!) that help women to access the money, skills, and knowledge needed to grow their businesses quickly – Make Mine a Million, being a leader among them. And it is a shame that lack of access to funding and critical resources limits women who do want to grow businesses in this way.

But, I like Darla’s post because it authentically speaks about a different but common entrepreneurial experience. The reality is that there are many kinds of entrepreneurs, who need different types of support and various kinds of resources, but all of whom experience many of the same entrepreneurial challenges (innovation, positioning, motivation, execution, decision-making) and deserve the respect that goes with the territory.

And what I really liked were the responses to Darla’s post – all positive and supportive from other folks who also recognize that entrepreneurship truly encompasses a diversity of experience and purpose.