Women in Business learned about a major UK business support network at January’s Third Tuesday event (19th Jan 2010 at The Courthouse) which was sponsored by Paragon.

Over 40 attendees heard about the development of Forward Ladies from founder Etta Cohen.

Nine years ago, Forward Ladies started as a couple of ladies meeting every 6 months for lunch.  It’s now one of the fastest growing business networks in the UK, with over 7000 members and new groups in Manchester and very soon, Liverpool.

We heard about Business Breaks to Monaco and Florence, member discounts and events, success stories, Female Emerging Entrepreneur groups, Member Directories and Mentorship. 

I first met Etta in Leeds last year.  I’d hoped to get the benefit of her experience to help develop the group here to better meet members’ needs.  Etta kindly agreed to visit the Isle of Man, to meet our group and talk about how we can work together. The response here was extremely positive.  Etta was impressed and inspired by the women she met on the Isle of Man and about how our group had progressed in such a short time (especially with no money and only volunteers!).

The event also attracted interest from some new faces and young women who are just starting out in business. 

WiB steering committee members met the following day to discuss how to move things forward with our group.

Thanks to Etta, Paragon and to everyone who attended the event . . . some pics below!

Etta Cohen speaking to WiB members

We are very lucky to welcome Etta Cohen, founder of women’s networking club Forward Ladies as our speaker to the first Tuesday Club get together of 2010. 

Forward Ladies was founded in  2000, and much like our own Women in Business group, it began as a small group of professional women meeting and sharing experiences. Since then, it has grown with members driving the organisation forward.  Now it’s one of the North’s fastest growing, women’s networking and business support organisations.

The Forward Ladies’ mission is to promote and celebrate the engagement and participation of women in economic success by enabling women to be more confident in life and business through knowledge, contacts, support and friendship.

Etta will discuss how her group has developed over the years and give us some tips on how our own group can continue to thrive.

Book now.  Email  info@iombic.im to reserve your place.

Women in Business Tuesday Club

• 19th January 2010, 6pm – 8pm
• The Courthouse Club, Athol Street, Douglas
• (Side Entrance via Lower Church Street)

Thanks to Paragon Recruitment for sponsoring this event.

Image via Wikipedia

The Daily Telegraph has picked up on the debate about so called ‘lipstick entrepreneurs.  Read on:

“Lipstick entrepreneurs” are emerging from their beauty parlours and sleep deprived “mumpreneurs” are finally cleaning all that baby puke from their hair to become fully fledged “domestecutives”. Simply being in business is so 2009; new labels are the new black in 2010.Future Laboratory, a “trends” consultancy, has been paid by the nice make-up people at Avon to come up with this ludicrous list of typologies. It’s enough to make one mourn the passing of the “oh, so sensible” Noughties.

Even Theresa May, the shadow women’s minister, has lent her support to the research.Business woman Shaa Wasmund was among those forced to dispense with the New Year cheer and admit she’d been riled by such stereotyping: “I just wonder how men would feel if we coined a new phrase, like jockstrap entrepreneur,” she asks. Why stop there, Shaa? The five o’clock shadowpreneur, sounds a little dishevelled. And how about one for the new wave of building firms likely to emerge from the ashes of the construction crash: the bottom crackpreneurs.

Click here to see the rest of this article.

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• A Question of Entrepreneurship (myventurepad.com)

The recession is helping to kick-start a home-based business economy. A third of those questioned in the latest Home Business Survey said they started their home-based business within the last year, highlighting the entrepreneurial spirit that has emerged from the downturn.

The increase of 300,000 home-based businesses means there are now 2.8m businesses operating full time from home, contributing £284 billion each year to the UK economy.

At the UK Business Incubation Conference in December, I met Emma Jones, founder of Enterprisenation.com , a free resource to help you start and grow your business at home.  I’d heard about Enterprise Nation through Twitter and Global Entrepreneurship Week (they had a Home Enterprise Day).

Emma gave a talk to incubation professionals about how incubators can support homeworkers – since not all will want (or need) to take up actual residency in the incubator.  Emma’s talk and energy really inspired me; it’s so relevant to how we live and work now. Plus she’s actually an experienced entrepreneur (she set up her first business at the age of 27 and sold it 15 months later).  We heard about the growing culture of “5 to 9″ ers people who work a full time job and run an additional business at home, of an evening.   Some do this as a hobby or to unleash their creative talents – many don’t aim to give up the day job.  Truly enterprising.

Homeworkers are often underrepresented in economic statistics as home businesses commonly outsource rather than employ.  Family commitments, personal preference, cost, lifestyle, location and the environment are all reasons why people might run a business from home.

Whatever the reason, if you are running a business from home, take a look at Enterprisenation.com .  It has great resources and links to help home businesses start up and grow.  I’ve already recommended it to a few homeworkers I work with.  When the weather is this snowy, there are more reasons than just bootstrapping for working from home!

The Home Business Report from November 2009 makes interesting reading.  Homeworkers should be celebrated.  I wonder how many we have on the Isle of Man and where their customers are? I’d love to meet some tech start-ups who are currently working from home.

Business incubators can help home workers in different ways.  The need for professional, physical office space and face-to-face networking is still (if not more important) even though the majority of work is done at home.  Business planning support and advice is relevant regardless of where you’re working.

If you are setting up an enterprise or have an innovative idea or invention,  contact the Isle of Man Business & Innovation Centre -  you could work at home, from our offices or both and receive business support and more. Support is free upon successful application.  Pre-start ups and aspiring entrepreneurs, or those looking for a collaborative venture are very welcome.  +44(0)1624 820930 .

This article is from www.enterprisenation.co.uk .

In the last 25 years Dee Blick has witnessed more than her fair share of good, bad and indifferent adverts. ‘I would like to think that I’ve been responsible for writing more good adverts than bad’ says Dee ‘but in my early years I was as guilty as anyone in writing adverts that were creative but didn’t actually generate responses.’ In this feature Dee offers 9 tips that will steer you in the right direction of writing adverts that do bring home the bacon!

1. Make your product or service the hero of your advert. In a small space, it’s vital that the reader knows exactly what is being advertised
2. Don’t get in a tangle if you don’t have a genuine unique selling point. Focus on being honest and informative. You don’t have to be a market leader to get responses
3. Write as though you are chatting to the reader – informal and engaging
4. Putting your headline in quotes can increase reader recall by about 25%
5. When you advertise in a local publication you can get better results if you make a prominent reference to the name of the city or town. People are interested in what’s happening where they live
6. More people read the captions under your images than the body copy itself. Make sure your caption includes your business name and a compelling benefit
7. If you have to communicate many different sales points, number or bullet them
8. Make an offer – limited to a number of readers and add a close date to encourage early responses
9. If you don’t have a designer, ask the magazine if they will design your advert, even if you have to pay for it. Looks and content count if you want responses

For more from Dee Blick and Marketing see www.themarketinggym.org .

Are you part of Britain’s growing number of homeworkers?  Check out www.enterprisenation.co.uk A free resource to help you start and grow your business at home, they have some excellent resources and case studies.

Budge over, boys. The next decade will be women’s, if a recent forecast is to be believed.

“A tenfold increase in the number of female CEOs in FTSE 100 companies!”, “Double the number of female MPs!”, “100% growth in women-owned start-ups!” — these predictions come from the trendspotter Jeremy Baker, of ECSP Europe Business School.

At a recent Avon-commissioned discussion on the rise of “lipstick entrepreneurs” (otherwise known as independent businesswomen), there was breathless talk of female boards and millionaires, of a rise in househusbands and of the end of the pay gap and the glass ceiling. Shiny new names addressed a brand-new vision: “femterprise”, “domestecutives” and, of course, the “lipstick entrepreneur”. According to the Future Laboratory’s accompanying report, we are right at the tipping point of “femterprise”.

And the catalyst for this progress? The “mancession”, obviously (so named because it was men who were bitten hardest). With a nothing-to-lose attitude, women have been rolling up their sleeves and jumping in to bail out the boys. “Women deliver on a call to action,” says the UK president of Avon, Anna Segatti.

The recession necessitated enterprise — the report claims that the past 12 months have seen a significant growth in the number of women starting their own businesses and entering the workforce, often for the first time in their lives. There are now more than 1m self-employed women in the UK, and that figure is set to double in the next decade. In United States, meanwhile, businesses owned by women are growing at twice the rate of all American firms, according to Michael J Silverstein and Kate Sayre in their new book , Women Want More (Collins Business £18.99).

With job security still looking shaky, and childcare still largely the preserve of women, it’s easy to see the appeal of the start-up. This new class of “fempreneur” makes her work fit around her life — by being her own boss, she can choose her own (family-friendly) hours, preferred work/life balance and office location.

And for the “mumpreneur”, there’s no place like home. “Homeworking makes total sense,” says Suze Orman, a personal-finance expert and author of Women & Money: Owning the Power to Control Your Destiny (Spiegel & Grau £15.14). “I don’t have an office and I don’t have employees, but independent contractors. It saves me so much money.”

In the aftermath of what has also been called a man-made recession (blame it on those greedy male bankers), enter the right-brain revolution — one that values the feminine skills of intuition, communication and caring. The Future Laboratory argues that female methods make a lot more sense now: it’s risk awareness over risk-taking, teamwork over power struggles, inclusivity over hierarchy and striving for the common good, not bonus-based greed.

No wonder, then, that the recently launched Women’s Leadership Fund (worth some £124m and backed by Cherie Blair) is investing in firms that have high numbers of women in senior roles. Its research shows that companies with a balance of men and women in senior jobs outperform those with men at the helm. Yet while Norway has met its 40% quota for women in the boardroom, in Britain the figure stands at just 12%. And the current count of female FTSE 100 CEOs? Just four. Some areas clearly remain bastions of male power — but for how much longer?

The femterprise revolution is under way.

Click here to read the rest of this Sunday Times article

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• CBI calls for more business women (news.bbc.co.uk)
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Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Rebel Cole and Hamid Mehran studied data from the Federal Reserve’s Surveys of Small Business Finances (SSBFs) for the years 1987 – 2003 and published their findings in an August 2009 study titled, “Gender and the Availability of Credit to Privately Held Firms: Evidence from the Surveys of Small Business Finances.”

What they found was that female-owned firms are:

1. much smaller than male-owned firms, in terms of sales, assets, and employment;
2. younger, both in terms of the age of the firm, as well as in terms of the age of the owners;
3. less likely to be incorporated;
4. likely to have fewer and shorter banking relationships, and
5. “more likely to be discouraged from applying for credit, though not more likely to be denied credit when they do apply.”

Credit expert and author Gerri Detweiller has some interesting observations about the findings.  She says that the lessons for women who run their own businesses is clear.

“It can pay to set up your business properly. The fact that a significant percentage of female owned firms operate as sole proprietors is one clue that something is amiss. You cannot get true business credit if you have not set up a corporate structure.

“As a sole proprietor, you may be able to get a credit card with the business name on it, but your business and personal credit are one and the same. So even if you don’t need credit yet, look forward when choosing your business structure. Though you may be a small firm today, what structure best meets your future goals for growth?”

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• Using Business Credit Cards (cathystucker.com)

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Norway and France are bringing in legislation forcing companies to welcome women into the boardroom. The HR Zone blog has an excellent post giving the details and arguing for something similar in the UK.

According to the blog, just over one in ten (11%) of the FTSE 100 company directors are women. This compares with now 44% in Norway since it legislated in 2003, and the intended French aim of 40% within four years. Click here to read it in full.

Tonight was Women In Business’s Tuesday Club meeting and the focus was on ’speed networking’. Think line dancing meets speeds dating meets networking.  Fifty business women showed up and we each got a chance to chat to ten individuals one on one.  Here’s some video clips of some of the participants, and the two women who organised the evening.

It was a really fun, and fruitful evening.  We won’t be meeting in December, because everyone is busy enough.  But watch this space for what’s going on in January.

Pam Neill

Julie Fraser

Other women in business

prepared by Pam Neill and Julie Fraser

Speed Networking is a fun, energetic and dynamic way to build relationships and develop a thriving, successful word-of-mouth network

How does it work?

You will have a few minutes with each person to introduce yourself, your business/company, what you do and what you want from the evening.

At the end there will be time for you to connect with anyone you missed or to extend the conversations with those of your choice.

How do I prepare?

1. It is important to think about what you want to get out of the evening.  Some examples are:

• You need contacts within an organisation to get a job or promote a product or service you have
• You are wanting to generate publicity for an event
• You want to widen your circle of business / personal contacts
• You want to mix with like minded people

2. Have a well prepared USP or ‘elevator speech’.  Very simply this is :

• Your name
• Your company/business name
• What you/your company does
• What you want to get out of the evening

3. Make it engaging as you will be desperate to hear something entertaining and memorable by the time you get to the last person – and so will they!

4. Bring plenty of business cards or note cards with your contact info on.  Also bring extra flyers or promotional material along for those that want more information.

5. Take notes.  This will help you remember important facts about that person, their interests and goals.

6. Challenge yourself to help at least one person that you meet.  If everyone does this the impact of this event could be huge.

What happens after the event?

The real magic starts to happen when you build and continue the relationships outside of the event. So, visit the websites of the people that attended, send them an email, phone them and suggest another meeting with the intention of becoming better acquainted and finding out how you can both help each other.