This year, Enterprising Women Magazine celebrates its 12th year of recognizing highly successful women business owners.
The world of women's entrepreneurship has changed substantially since those early years. The top revenue category for the Enterprising Women Awardees was $10 million, and only a few honorees were in that category. Over the years, women-owned businesses have flourished -- both in numbers and size -- and today, the top revenue category has more than doubled to $25 million and up. This year, nearly 9% of the winners have businesses well over $25 million. In fact, the top winner has revenues of $660 million dollars!
Women Thinking Big Business
While access to capital, markets, and networks has been critical in the growth of women-owned businesses, the most important factor is the transformation in the mindset that women bring to their businesses. Women are thinking BIG! They have high expectations and high growth goals from the first day. "Don't let others' expectations or what your competitors have achieved limit your aspirations," our winners tell us. "Your goals should be to surpass them all."
The value of setting high goals is not just a motivational myth! A study by the Center for Women's Business Research found that the only statistically significant predictor of whether a woman business owner will be successful in obtaining expansion capital is not the size of the business, the number of years in business, or the industry -- it is the woman owner's growth goals.
Women business owners who start with a big vision make decisions differently from the beginning. The way they talk about their business to employees, customers, vendors, and financial institutions is different. Their business plans are growth oriented, and they establish the infrastructure to run a growing business. Our winners tell us they keep their eyes on the horizon, focusing on where they want to be, not on where they are.
Further, when highly successful women entrepreneurs achieve their goals, they ratchet up their expectations. Almost all of the 2014 winners including those in the top revenue categories project strong double-digit revenue growth this year.
Learning from the Award Winners
Every year, in addition to honoring these highly accomplished women business owners, we ask what we can learn from them to help other women business owners achieve their highest aspirations.
The award winners offer proven, practical lessons and insights on what it takes to launch and lead a fast-growing successful business. We ask them to tell us about their challenges, how they overcame those challenges, what they know now they wish they had known earlier, and what advice they would give others. For the past five years, I have had the privilege of analyzing the responses to these questions and sharing the results with the Enterprising Women Magazine's readers.
Agility is Key to Success
This year the winners stressed the importance of agility. In today's fast-paced, technology-driven world characterized by rapid and often unpredictable change, the successful business leader must be agile.
Being agile means continually evaluating the match between your business operations and reality. Be alert to emerging mis-matches and be open to changing. "Avoid falling so much in love with the way you are operating today that you do not for-see the need for change," say our winners. Agile leaders are alert to new patterns and are willing to shift with their industry, move into new industries, and adopt new ways of doing business.
Identify your company's unique strengths -- build on them. Be on the lookout for ways to apply those strengths in new ways. One company among this year's honorees knew their strength was in recruiting, but the industry where they had made their name was on the decline. Their response: apply the company's strengths to move into an industry that was just beginning its growth cycle. The result: the company now is in the over $25 million category.
Another company, with expertise in the IT industry, foresaw a declining need for the business services they provided. In this case, the business owner saw the opportunity to build on the company's established reputation in the industry while re-vamping its products and services to get ahead of the industry's emerging needs. The result: another of the over $25 million honorees.
Agile leaders also are continuously evaluating internal infrastructure and operations. While fast growth is very good, growing faster than you infrastructure can handle it can be problematic. It takes courage to pause growth while the company re-engineers its systems, policies, and procedures to accommodate that growth. Yet that is what one of this year's winners did. The result: once the company resumed growth, it more than doubled its size and revenues.
New technologies are opening up new ways of operating -- delivering the same services to the same customers but more efficiently and profitability. A former Enterprising Women winner with many years in business recently transformed her operations from the traditional model with employees housed together in one or two central locations to a distributed model. Today, the majority of employees work remotely. The new model not only reduces overhead significantly but also improved responsiveness.
These are just a few examples of agility. Being agile is similar to rotating a kaleidoscope. Each time you rotate it -- even slightly -- the glass bits come together in new and, often, unexpected patterns. The agile leader keeps rotating her view to discover possibilities and is open to change -- whether a little tweaking or a business transformation.
The Perennial Seven Fundamentals of Successful Women Business Owners
Although the specific challenges the award winners have overcome may vary from year to year, these seven fundamentals of success have remained consistent year after year.
1. Know your values. Your values are your core say highly successful women leaders. Have the courage to act consistently with your values in every decision and action. This is the foundation of women 's strength as business owners and leaders.
2. Own your company's culture. Successful women leaders create shared values, mission, and goals. You can delegate everything else but you must always hold the culture in your hands.
Hire people whose values align with your company's culture and who believe in you as an entrepreneur. Research shows that no matter how smart and experienced a new hire is, if the individual's values do not align with the company's culture, overall productivity will go down.
3. Build high performing teams. Show people you value and trust them. Share the goals, engage everyone in delivering the highest performance -- then step aside and let them perform.
4. Learn from failure. In fact, say many successful women business owners, failure is the best way to learn what works and what does not. Separate the failure -- whether yours or an employee's -- from the individual, figure out what happened and why, learn, and move on.
5. No "would-a, could-a, should-a." Don't obsess about missed opportunities or past mistakes. Turn to the future and move forward with confidence.
6. Never underestimate the power of your networks. Networks are an important source of knowledge and support. In addition to your industry networks, seek out networks of like-minded women who come together to share advice, pay it forward through causes such as mentoring, support one another in the tough times, and celebrate each other's successes.
Sharon Hadary is the co-author with Laura Henderson of How Women Lead: The 8 Essential Strategies Successful Women Know. Sharon, former and founding executive director of the Center for Women's Business Research, is an adjunct professor in the Doctor of Management Program at the University of Maryland University College, and blogs for The Wall Street Journal's Small Business Forum. She is a recognized thought-leader on women's entrepreneurship and leadership. She also is a proud member of the Enterprising Women's Board of Advisors and a supporter of the Enterprising Women's Foundation.
Originally published in Enterprising Women Magazine.
The world of women's entrepreneurship has changed substantially since those early years. The top revenue category for the Enterprising Women Awardees was $10 million, and only a few honorees were in that category. Over the years, women-owned businesses have flourished -- both in numbers and size -- and today, the top revenue category has more than doubled to $25 million and up. This year, nearly 9% of the winners have businesses well over $25 million. In fact, the top winner has revenues of $660 million dollars!
Women Thinking Big Business
While access to capital, markets, and networks has been critical in the growth of women-owned businesses, the most important factor is the transformation in the mindset that women bring to their businesses. Women are thinking BIG! They have high expectations and high growth goals from the first day. "Don't let others' expectations or what your competitors have achieved limit your aspirations," our winners tell us. "Your goals should be to surpass them all."
The value of setting high goals is not just a motivational myth! A study by the Center for Women's Business Research found that the only statistically significant predictor of whether a woman business owner will be successful in obtaining expansion capital is not the size of the business, the number of years in business, or the industry -- it is the woman owner's growth goals.
Women business owners who start with a big vision make decisions differently from the beginning. The way they talk about their business to employees, customers, vendors, and financial institutions is different. Their business plans are growth oriented, and they establish the infrastructure to run a growing business. Our winners tell us they keep their eyes on the horizon, focusing on where they want to be, not on where they are.
Further, when highly successful women entrepreneurs achieve their goals, they ratchet up their expectations. Almost all of the 2014 winners including those in the top revenue categories project strong double-digit revenue growth this year.
Learning from the Award Winners
Every year, in addition to honoring these highly accomplished women business owners, we ask what we can learn from them to help other women business owners achieve their highest aspirations.
The award winners offer proven, practical lessons and insights on what it takes to launch and lead a fast-growing successful business. We ask them to tell us about their challenges, how they overcame those challenges, what they know now they wish they had known earlier, and what advice they would give others. For the past five years, I have had the privilege of analyzing the responses to these questions and sharing the results with the Enterprising Women Magazine's readers.
Agility is Key to Success
This year the winners stressed the importance of agility. In today's fast-paced, technology-driven world characterized by rapid and often unpredictable change, the successful business leader must be agile.
Being agile means continually evaluating the match between your business operations and reality. Be alert to emerging mis-matches and be open to changing. "Avoid falling so much in love with the way you are operating today that you do not for-see the need for change," say our winners. Agile leaders are alert to new patterns and are willing to shift with their industry, move into new industries, and adopt new ways of doing business.
Identify your company's unique strengths -- build on them. Be on the lookout for ways to apply those strengths in new ways. One company among this year's honorees knew their strength was in recruiting, but the industry where they had made their name was on the decline. Their response: apply the company's strengths to move into an industry that was just beginning its growth cycle. The result: the company now is in the over $25 million category.
Another company, with expertise in the IT industry, foresaw a declining need for the business services they provided. In this case, the business owner saw the opportunity to build on the company's established reputation in the industry while re-vamping its products and services to get ahead of the industry's emerging needs. The result: another of the over $25 million honorees.
Agile leaders also are continuously evaluating internal infrastructure and operations. While fast growth is very good, growing faster than you infrastructure can handle it can be problematic. It takes courage to pause growth while the company re-engineers its systems, policies, and procedures to accommodate that growth. Yet that is what one of this year's winners did. The result: once the company resumed growth, it more than doubled its size and revenues.
New technologies are opening up new ways of operating -- delivering the same services to the same customers but more efficiently and profitability. A former Enterprising Women winner with many years in business recently transformed her operations from the traditional model with employees housed together in one or two central locations to a distributed model. Today, the majority of employees work remotely. The new model not only reduces overhead significantly but also improved responsiveness.
These are just a few examples of agility. Being agile is similar to rotating a kaleidoscope. Each time you rotate it -- even slightly -- the glass bits come together in new and, often, unexpected patterns. The agile leader keeps rotating her view to discover possibilities and is open to change -- whether a little tweaking or a business transformation.
The Perennial Seven Fundamentals of Successful Women Business Owners
Although the specific challenges the award winners have overcome may vary from year to year, these seven fundamentals of success have remained consistent year after year.
1. Know your values. Your values are your core say highly successful women leaders. Have the courage to act consistently with your values in every decision and action. This is the foundation of women 's strength as business owners and leaders.
2. Own your company's culture. Successful women leaders create shared values, mission, and goals. You can delegate everything else but you must always hold the culture in your hands.
Hire people whose values align with your company's culture and who believe in you as an entrepreneur. Research shows that no matter how smart and experienced a new hire is, if the individual's values do not align with the company's culture, overall productivity will go down.
3. Build high performing teams. Show people you value and trust them. Share the goals, engage everyone in delivering the highest performance -- then step aside and let them perform.
4. Learn from failure. In fact, say many successful women business owners, failure is the best way to learn what works and what does not. Separate the failure -- whether yours or an employee's -- from the individual, figure out what happened and why, learn, and move on.
5. No "would-a, could-a, should-a." Don't obsess about missed opportunities or past mistakes. Turn to the future and move forward with confidence.
6. Never underestimate the power of your networks. Networks are an important source of knowledge and support. In addition to your industry networks, seek out networks of like-minded women who come together to share advice, pay it forward through causes such as mentoring, support one another in the tough times, and celebrate each other's successes.
Sharon Hadary is the co-author with Laura Henderson of How Women Lead: The 8 Essential Strategies Successful Women Know. Sharon, former and founding executive director of the Center for Women's Business Research, is an adjunct professor in the Doctor of Management Program at the University of Maryland University College, and blogs for The Wall Street Journal's Small Business Forum. She is a recognized thought-leader on women's entrepreneurship and leadership. She also is a proud member of the Enterprising Women's Board of Advisors and a supporter of the Enterprising Women's Foundation.
Originally published in Enterprising Women Magazine.