On the surface, statistics about the growth of women-owned businesses look encouraging. According to NAWBO, in 2017, there were over 11.6 million firms owned by women, employing 9 million people and generating $1.7 trillion in sales. In fact, women-owned businesses have been growing faster than the national average over the last ten years.
But if you dig a layer deeper, you’ll see that most of these businesses are clustered in three areas – retail, healthcare services, and professional services. Most of them also earn less than $100,000 a year. Notably absent are high growth industries with the potential for increased earning potential.
I met Kathryn Rose several years ago at a conference. She has hit on an idea for helping female business owners branch out into new industries and accelerate their growth potential. Her inspiration was her own career arc and the demand from other people for her help connecting them to mentors and potential partners or service providers.
Through those requests, she realized that women entrepreneurs need affordable, industry and situation-specific mentoring or advice. The result is wiseHer, an automated networking platform for women offering access to and advice from experts in increments as short as 30-minutes. Women with questions ranging from marketing and SEO advice to how to structure their business can logon, choose a vetted industry expert, and select the duration of their interaction.
While I loved the idea enough to join wiseHer as an expert (note: I donate all proceeds I receive from wiseHer to TechGirlz), I was even more struck by Rose’s personal story. As with so many women that have appeared in this column, she had no technology training before becoming interested in the sector and has now launched her own platform business.
Rose began her career on Wall Street in the good times of the early 2000s. But in 2007, her life changed abruptly when she gave birth to her first child, was laid off because of the collapse of the mortgage industry, and her mother was paralyzed by a brain aneurysm. Within a few months’ time, she was job as a young mother with an ailing parent.
After a stint as a social media consultant, she found her way to a Software as a Service (SaaS) company named SharedVue that provided marketing automation software to technology channel partners. As a Sales Director, Rose had to learn about software and the larger industry. She quickly fell in love with technology.
Rose was enthralled by the tech and its power to enable partners through cloud-based marketing capabilities. Eager to learn everything she could, Rose became friends with the R&D team and asked to sit in on all on their meetings.
It was during those sessions that she learned how engineers collaborate and speak with one another, about the innards of the company’s technology, and practices like sprints and standups. Rose’s command of the technology grew to the point where she no longer needed engineers to join her on sales calls with customers and prospects.
Beyond her proficiency with tech, Rose was also building a vast network of contacts, When the company was eventually sold and Rose was forced to find another job, it was this network that sowed the seeds for wiseHer.
Encouraged by her husband to go back out on her own and launch a business, Rose spent her down time helping make connections for people that asked for introductions to others within her network. She quickly realized she could turn that network into a business helping other women business owners gain access to advisors in a cost-effective, targeted manner.
Rose immediately understand this nascent idea would only work as a technology platform play structured as a directory. She had no coding background but was familiar with basic tools from her work at SharedVue, so she set out on a crash course with assistance from her network contacts.
After buying a source license for the directory, Rose taught herself HTML using free code camps and academies then learned PHP. Her goal was not a perfect or final product, but a working prototype she could show investors and the experts that would eventually populate her site.
Rose stressed to me that she launched the business on her own without a technical cofounder. She said she’s often asked by non-technical people how they can start a business without a knowledgeable partner. In her experience, finding a technical partner – or even first hire – that fits with the business is not always easy. Rose said she followed the advice of one of her own advisors to “just shut up and launch it” by learning enough technology basics herself.
Eventually, Rose used early funding to hire a team and build out the full working platform. She officially launched wiseHer this past fall. But it was her ability to get out of her comfort zone and build a prototype to attract funds and visibility that made the difference.
That’s the lesson for other female entrepreneurs. It’s possible to scale an existing business through technology or launch your own tech business without deep pockets or a computer science background. We need more passionate founders and good ideas to continue expanding the number of women-owned businesses in new and high growth industries.
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December 30, 2019 at 10:57PM
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