Power, Passion, Perspective: A Portrait of the Nation’s Women Entrepreneurs (Cover story, June 2000)

Who is today’s woman business owner? She’s typically 35 to 55 years old. You could flip a coin to determine whether she has set up shop at home or at an office, because the chances are nearly 50-50. There’s also a 50 percent chance she’s in the service industry and started her business more than five years ago.

If she’s working in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia or Houston, she’s helping set the national pace in one of the top five metropolitan areas for women-owned businesses.

She’s financing her company’s growth through her business earnings, but she had to rely on credit cards to get started. She risked everything to go into business for herself – not necessarily because she hit a glass ceiling, but because she had a great entrepreneurial idea and figured she could make money with it.

Who is today’s woman business owner? Let’s take a look…

Letter from the Editor: Defining today’s feminist (August 2000)
Gloria Steinem got me thinking.

Sure, I know, that’s no surprise. As the leader of the 1970s women’s movement, Steinem has made a lot of women stop and think about their roles in society.

But this time it was different. As she spoke about feminism and its positive and negative connotations during a recent breakfast meeting in Washington, she got me thinking about how the world’s definitions are constantly changing. Existing definitions are challenged all the time as we struggle to come up with new terms to define what’s happening right here, right now.

Steinem made all of us think that morning during the 25th anniversary convention of the National Association of Women Business Owners. About 500 of us had gathered in the shadow of the U.S. Capitol to talk about leadership of our individual chapters, the organization, and the nation.

As she spoke, I thought about the definitions in my own world.
If my antiques business were growing as quickly as some of the mostly high-tech firms that are making headlines these days, it might be called a "gazelle" after an animal known for its speed.

But alas, that’s not likely to happen. My business is more apt to fit another new definition, one that is emerging under a movement encouraging the U.S. government to add a classification smaller than the small business: "microbusiness." As a mom-and-pop shop with three employees and a bunch of friends helping part-time for big events, my company, DiAntiques, doesn’t share the same business concerns as companies that employ 100 people. That’s not to say I haven’t struggled with human resources issues just as you have - how many of you have ever had to lay off your own mother? - but my struggles are a tiny mirror of your own.

Then there’s the definition of the business owner. Even that is changing today. I wonder about those of you whose companies have grown so large that you’ve brought in outside investors. Maybe you used to be a one-person company with complete autonomy over every decision. You used to pray every day for more business, not even worrying yet how you would handle the extra work.

Then your company expanded beyond your wildest dreams. You brought in outside investors to help you finance the growth. Now you own maybe 20 percent of it. The company still bears your name and follows your vision, but it’s not really considered yours anymore. It has fallen off the radar screens of the people who keep tallies of women-owned businesses because you no longer own at least 51 percent of it.

I talked about this with recently Bruce Rosenthal, spokesman for the National Foundation for Women Business Owners. As the nation’s leading authority on researching women-owned businesses, the group in Washington, D.C., constantly studies changing definitions. Rosenthal said there’s no way to tell how many businesses out there are truly women-owned even though they have investors holding major chunks of them.
Which brings up another definition. There’s a new measuring stick to determine the prestige of a business owner. That used to be determined by the percentage of the company the person owned. Today it’s determined by how much capital the company has raised.

So how does Gloria Steinem fit into all of this? Sure, she’s an entrepreneur. She has run Ms. magazine for decades, among her other endeavors. But what could a feminist who’s called a "femi-Nazi" by radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh and his conservative followers tell us about the role of the woman business owner in today’s society? Most of the business owners I know want to be considered equal to their male counterparts, and we’d just as soon ignore the differences between the genders instead of fighting to point them out.

I wondered what Steinem’s message would be when I saw her name on the program as the keynote speaker for the NAWBO breakfast. What would Steinem have to offer to the women of NAWBO?

An earful. A conscience. A sense of history. A place in history. And some new definitions.

Steinem challenged us to look up "feminism" in the dictionary. It says nothing about burning bras or hating men. Here’s what it does say, according to Webster’s:

Feminism, n. 1. A doctrine advocating social, political, and economic rights for women equal to those of men. 2. A movement for the attainment of such rights. 3. Feminine character.

Being a feminist means you believe both genders should have an equal shot at success. Qualified women-owned businesses should be able to raise as much capital as qualified businesses owned by men. They should get equal shots at procuring government contracts, and at testifying about business issues on Capitol Hill.

Who among us could argue with that?

Steinem challenged all of us in the audience that day to keep plugging away for financial equality on a national level. We probably have another 70 years to go, she said. Before women can become equal, more definitions have to change – including the definition of work itself.
Women who stay home and care for their children or their parents are considered jobless, but that definition is being challenged today by people such as Hazel Henderson, a futurist who has helped craft a whole new way of looking at the nation’s gross national product to include workers who are not now counted by the U.S. Department of Labor.

Groups like NAWBO are today’s women’s movement, Steinem said. They create a way to bring women together to challenge the status quo. After all, women – unlike other minority groups – have no nation, no neighborhood, not even a bar of their own.

"We’ll never get anywhere politically until we learn we have to vote for people who are going to vote for us and we learn to take ourselves more seriously," Steinem said.

She really got me thinking.

You CAN Fight City Hall – Even the Capitol: Women Business Owners Are Working to Change National Public Policy (October 2000)

So your company is struggling to land that big government contract. Taxes are killing you, and you’re wrestling with your accountant over how to keep health insurance for all of your employees. You’re poised to expand your business, but the local, state and federal rules are more confusing than a textbook on quantum physics. There ought to be a law!
Sure, everyone says that. But how many people act on it? Actually, your sister entrepreneurs are taking your causes, and others, to lawmakers every day.

Letter from the Editor: The game of the name (June 2002)
Jeff Taylor was running down a hallway looking for a meeting room. I could hear his footsteps as the founder of Monster.com talked to me on a headset connected to his cell phone, stopping to shake hands with business associates along the way. Ah, the life of a busy entrepreneur.
The subject of our conversation was so near to his heart that he was taking time at 7:45 one Tuesday morning from 1,000 miles away to answer my question: How important is a name to the success of a business?

Very, Taylor says.

Here at Venture Woman, it took months of research for us to come up with just the right name for a magazine that would showcase the work of women business owners. Choosing a name that would match our mission was our top priority. You know what I’m talking about – you’ve all been through this as entrepreneurs. Your name has to project the right image. It’s your identity. It’s your mark.

For weeks, the publisher and I sat in her office, in my office, at restaurants, in pubs, in a drive-through bank teller line, and even at a picnic bench behind the local McDonald’s. We tossed around words and ran our fingers through them like we were mixing a salad. She combed through Internet pages on her laptop computer, and I carried around my Synonym Finder book and a yellow legal pad.

With each new idea, we’d look for feedback from personal advisers – co-workers, family members, friends, business contacts from all over the nation. If only I had a nickel for every time I heard, “But what does it mean?”

That’s when I thought of Monster.com.

What does Monster mean, and how did the name become synonymous with the “monster board” posting of resumes, job listings and career services that have made the 600-employee company so well-known?
Taylor talked to me about his choice of the name Monster.com. To appreciate it, you have to know its history. He owned an advertising agency in Massachusetts, and a client was looking for an ad campaign that would blow away the competition.

“I don’t want a big idea,” the client said. “I want a monster idea.”
The phrase stuck with Taylor and became kind of a mantra at his ad agency. So when it came time to choose a name for the online job board he was found a few years later, he went with his gut instinct.

Everyone hated the name – his ad agency employees, his clients, even his wife.

Today, however, he says choosing a quirky name that cut through the clutter and really stood out was the single most important part of the company’s initial success.

Of course, it takes more work on the front end to promote a company that isn’t named after its product or its owners, Taylor said. But that happens to be his specialty.

When he was seeking a name for his ad agency in 1989, he discovered that more than 400 of those founded before his in Massachusetts were name after their owners. He anted something different.

He named his company Adion – “ad” for the product and “ion” for a particle of energy. To him, the name meant “advertising energy,” and that was what his company was all about.

“At the beginning, people thought it was really odd,” he said.
But the name caught on, and the experience gave him the confidence later to choose a wacky name for the Internet company. And so he created a Monster.

It isn’t the only one out there. Look at the other odd names that have become household words: Amazon, Yahoo, Band-Aid, Kleenex, Jell-O, Q-Tip, Slurpee. What did those words mean before their creators “branded” them and taught the buying public that the name equals the product?
One thing you need to consider, Taylor says, is that your name can’t be so trendy it becomes outdated as the company grows. For instance, he predicts his company – the 454th to adopt a “dot-com” name – will become just “Monster” within the next five years. Consumers will tire of hearing “dot-com.”

That could mean trouble for some companies. What would happen to Furniture.com or Women.com or Beer.com?

At Venture Woman, we’ve given ourselves room to evolve. Who knows, someday there might be a Venture Man magazine, or Venture Teen.
I know what you’re thinking. We’ve taken a lot of ribbing from our friends who say Venture Woman sounds like a comic strip character. And someday she will be – we’re going to audition artists for a monthly comic strip soon.

But what about the name Venture Woman? What does it mean? We chose the name because of its strength. Venture means capital. Venture means risk. To us, venture means undertaking a business enterprise for two reasons: to profit and just because you believe in it. And woman? Well, we all know that means power. Just look at the statistics with our cover story!

Together the words mean whatever you want them to mean. We want Venture Woman to be your magazine, and only you can make it interactive. I encourage you to contact me – or any of our other writers – with ideas, comments, suggestions.

Just don’t ask me to help you choose a name for your latest endeavor. My Synonym Finder is worn out.