Networking is a tricky word — especially for women in business. For some, networking conjures up images of crowded rooms full of people in suits exchanging business cards. For others, it might feel like asking someone to do something for you, which can be uncomfortable for many women.

The best thing to do when something that is necessary and critical to success is uncomfortable, is to reframe it. Networking is nothing more than building relationships with people who can help you and people who you can help. Problem solved, right? Women like to help others…but that asking for help from others part is not so cozy to many women. Why? Because we tend to be social and communicative, but we don’t feel comfortable with defining what comes naturally to us. The solution? Build the relationships before you need to ask for help. By the time you need to make the ask, you have already established trust, reliability and familiarity — all the things needed to ask and receive. 
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When it comes to funding startups and small businesses, why does it seem that the guys play a simple round of golf and come home with a check? Yet, a lot of female founders get turned away by early-stage funders. If you look at the stats, it appears this scenario does play out around the country. For instance, in Small Business Association (SBA) lending, 72 percent of loans go to men, and men in general receive more dollars per loan than women. However, what I believe is happening is that all the relationship building has been going on for our male counterparts for quite a while. When the need arises for help funding that new or growing venture and the ask is made, the relationship originated months or even years ago. Men play golf (or paddle, or tennis, or bowling or 5Ks) frequently. So, when around the nineteenth hole someone asks for a mere half a million dollars or so, the heavy lifting has already been done. And the person being asked already knows they can trust the person making the request. They know a bit about the business venture and know they will be paid back either by loan repayment or through an equity event. The person requesting the funding has already proven they can be an asset to the person investing or doing the lending. They'll do it through making connections or helping support the funder’s business in some other way. 

Women can do this give-and-take relationship building in our sleep. But as soon as the word networking enters the conversation, our internal radar starts blinking the warning lights. But talk to us about our relationships, and we can dive wholeheartedly into that conversation. So, what is the difference? Nothing really, except the words themselves. Think of people who are not close friends or family with whom you have a relationship. Hair stylists, children’s friends’ parents, schoolteachers, high school friends you notice on social media having successful careers, etc. You think of these as relationships — distant maybe, but relationships, nonetheless. Now, think about asking any of these people to make a referral for you. For instance, what banker did you use when you set up your salon? Once you build your confidence to ask these types of questions, then one thing leads to another and you are meeting with a banker. Once they get to know you and understand your business needs, they will be inclined to help you. And, to be sure that you are ready for funding when you need it.


Getting your business noticed early on by people who are connected to the money you may need is what networking is all about. But it isn’t always all about the money. You will need other things to make your business grow. Real estate in an up-and-coming part of town, talent to build out your team, legal support, a great CPA and so on. Networking (aka relationship building) will put you in the position to ask the right people for what you need. Put the shoe on the other foot; a college friend opens a business in your community and reaches out on social media to say, your business looks so fascinating! I just started a business also. Would you have time to get coffee and share your experiences with me? Of course, you’d say yes, and a networking connection has been established. This won’t feel like a preconceived impression of networking. The more you do it, the more it feels like a natural cycle of you help me, I am happy to help you, also.

So, reframe this uncomfortable networking thing, get out there and build relationships. When you are the new success story in town, believe me, everyone will want to network with you!



​Source: Entrepreneur.com
Image Credit: ​Photo by Christina Morillo from Pexels.com

A majority of professionals claim they want to start their own business, but an extraordinarily small percentage actually do. Excuses include family obligations, bad timing, risk aversion, not enough savings, etc., but the most common excuse I hear is that they're just waiting for the right idea to "come to them." We have a cartoonish fantasy that one day a lightbulb will flash in our heads as we strike pure inspiration for an idea so original or so nuanced that we feel utterly compelled to become an entrepreneur in order to bring it to market. While lightbulb moments may exist for some select entrepreneurs, for most great product or business concepts out there, you need to be highly intentional in how you chart a path to uncovering them. 
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I founded an innovative and profitable small business that took me all the way to Shark Tank, Forbes 30 under 30 and over $1 million in revenue in just a few years. The idea didn’t just come to me. Instead, it took four months of highly organized and intentional time to find it. If you want to find your startup idea, here are the steps to follow:

1. Commit to an intended outcome, a schedule and a timeline
Start by making your ideation process have a beginning and an end, along with a specific schedule of working sessions. My business partner and I committed to a six-month period of meeting at least twice a week in the evening for 5 hour blocks on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Our intended outcomes were a product concept with a strong enough G2M plan that we felt confident enough in to fully commit to. If we still didn’t have our idea in six months or weren’t feeling confident in the one we had, then we would scrap it and call it quits on this round. If you don’t set a strict end date, you risk losing the sense of discipline that comes hand in hand with urgency.

2. Get your family on board with the commitment
Don’t hustle in the dark. From day one of your commitment, share the plan and time investment with your family, and emphasize why this is so important to you. Most likely, they’ll cheer you on and be some of your biggest advocates. Not being open about your ideation journey will likely lead to resentment. If your family is loving enough to let you put all this extra time towards your idea, be sure to pick up the slack by taking on additional chores around the house or planning a few extra date nights. It never hurts to show them how much you appreciate their support. 

3. Form guardrails derived from your interests, expertise and appetite for risk
Start by defining soft and hard guardrails to help narrow your ideation path. My co-founder was an architect, and we both loved woodworking. Okay … so maybe something made out of wood. We both were avid conservationists, so maybe something to do with nature. We weren’t eager to invest a lot of money upfront in the business, so maybe a product that could do well on a crowdfunding platform. Most were soft guardrails that played to our strengths and areas of interest, which typically lead to better outcomes anyway, but at the end of the day, the purpose of putting in guardrails is to focus your ideation. You can’t boil an ocean, but maybe you can boil a pool full of seawater. I highly suggest spending your first few meetings crafting these guardrails before diving into open brainstorming. 

4. Embrace diverse brainstorming techniques and immerse yourself in stimulating environments
Don’t just sit in a room and stare at a screen. Instead, research and adopt a wide variety of brainstorming techniques (i.e., cocktail mixers, stepladder, rolestorming, etc.) all while sticking to the four key roles of brainstorming: focus on quantity, withhold criticism, welcome wild ideas, and combine ideas for more ideas. The best thing you can do is surround yourself with a wide array of stimuli. We would spend hours at a time strolling down the aisles of Walmart just mentally mashing different products together in our heads. Walmart is a candy store for product brainstorming. 

5. Iterate, challenge, evolve
Once you’ve amassed a number of possible ideas, you enter the evaluation phase. This is where you can start getting critical with your ideas — evaluate how they align to your guardrails, use matrices to determine feasibility rankings, etc. Pay attention to your excitement during this phase. Which ideas do you find yourself advocating for the most? Why? Even if some ideas have more challenges than others, your passion will fuel you and help you overcome them when you later decide to bring it to market.

6. Once you commit, don’t doubt yourself
Once you come around to that idea that you’ve poked enough holes in to the point that you are feeling really confident, just go for it. Remember, you didn’t decide to become an entrepreneur just off of a single fleeting lightbulb moment … you just invested months of highly intentional time to come to a well-vetted idea. Have confidence in that, and take it to the next stage. 

Stop waiting for your lightbulb idea to just come to you, go out there and find it. What are you waiting for?



Source: entrepreneur.com 
Image Credit: ​Photo by Pixabay

Continuous innovation is important for the growth of any business. All innovation ultimately begins as a simple idea, but bringing that idea to life requires thoughtful and effective experimentation to reach a larger goal.

As successful business leaders, the members of Young Entrepreneur Council understand that testing must be done in a careful, controlled environment with clear metrics and benchmarks. Below, eight of them each share one step you should always take when testing out a new idea and explain how that step helps achieve the best end results.

1. Establish Constraints

Establish the constraints with which you'll evaluate the new idea. Be thoughtful about this and stick with it, even if your experiment doesn't go the way you expected. If you say that you're going to test an idea, software, process, etc. for three weeks, make sure you really mean it! If you've planned well enough, what you may find is that your idea will be better served by conducting multiple smaller experiments. This gives you the opportunity to evaluate more effectively between shorter milestones and innovate more quickly. - Christopher Tarantino, Epicenter Innovation

2. Gather Feedback

Whenever I’m trying to innovate or carve a new niche out for my business within my industry, an important first step is to always gather feedback from everyone on the team. Sometimes this means a minimally viable prototype of a product needs to be built, and sometimes it could just mean emailing a simple survey to the team about a new workflow process improvement. Gathering feedback internally from all employees regardless of title is a crucial piece of this process because it can shed light on potentially negative outcomes that may be overlooked by some team members. The very essence of true innovation is uncertainty—that’s what makes the results so special—so gaining as much intel as possible before investing too much into full production is crucial for success. - Richard Fong, Bliss Drive

3. Split Test

Split testing is an excellent way to test your ideas without a commitment. Essentially, this type of testing can be used on virtually every aspect of your marketing strategy and user interface. It involves changing one or more elements of your campaign or design and comparing it to the original version. The goal is to see if your experiment gets more traffic, engagement or clicks when compared to the live version on your site. As you experiment with calls to action, color schemes and offers, you'll slowly fine-tune your business based on how people respond to your tests. - John Brackett, Smash Balloon LLC

4. Set Budgets

We typically take a percentage of the budget to test. That way, all of our eggs aren't in one basket and we're able to judge success without messing up what is working. It allows us to get client-side approval as well. Then we evaluate the results and decide if we want to double down on the strategy, test a variation or determine it as nonviable for the time being. A separate budget for testing, research and development is key in innovating thoughtfully and judging the results. We also typically give specific time periods for such tests. - Ethan Kramer, EK Creative

5. Use UX Research Frameworks

Undoubtedly, businesses thrive and survive off their ability to innovate, move the needle and not become complacent or comfortable with the status quo. That said, experimentation needs to be done diligently, thoughtfully and always with a strategic lens. When it comes to testing new ideas and introducing new service lines or product features, it’s incredibly important to canvass plenty of potential users directly to gain candid and unfiltered insights and perspectives. Additionally, consider using some user experience (UX) research framework to pose thoughtful questions and gather this objective feedback. - Rong Zhang, Hirect

6. Define The Resources Needed

It's important to understand the potential resources and timelines needed to bring an idea to fruition. Oftentimes, management teams can overlook shortages in development time or shortages in a number of new processes that will be absolutely necessary for a project to have a chance at success. By taking the time to spell out what resources will be needed, even for an MVP, the likelihood of success with the project can increase dramatically. In addition, management teams will be more likely to prioritize projects that are most synergistic with their existing resources. - Fehzan Ali, Adscend Media LLC

7. Consider Scalability

The whole point of coming up with these great ideas is to have them be scalable. That means you can see them through to fruition and you can easily expand to new markets, products and services. The idea doesn't need to be one-size-fits-all. The point of an innovative idea is that you can make it work in a lot of different ways, and that's actually a good thing because then it's easier to figure out how to turn it into a sustainable business. If a lot of your time and money is going toward something that's going to be a flop, then you're just wasting your time and resources. Moreover, you need to find the ideas that fall into the sweet spot where they're relatively easy to execute and it feels like they're going to be successful. - Candice Georgiadis, Digital Day

8. Wait

We wait instead of jumping on the shiny new thing. This is our single most important vetting tool, because if an idea is just as exciting and seemingly valid a few weeks or especially a few months down the line, then we know we are onto something that warrants further attention. - James Simpson, GoldFire Studios



Source: https://www.forbes.com/

There is no denying that female founders often face an uphill battle in the business world. Not only do they receive a disproportionately small percentage of available VC funding, but they often face discrimination and sometimes even harassment.

Despite this, female founders continue to thrive. In fact, according to the National Association of Women Business Owners, “one in five firms with revenue of $1 million or more is woman-owned.”

Of course, to get to that level, you have to survive your first year in business. By being prepared for the opportunities and challenges that may come your way, you will be well positioned to make that first year a success.

1. Combatting ‘Proven Patterns’

Like it or not, female founders often face preconceived notions about what an entrepreneur should look like, what women are (and aren’t capable of) and even their dedication to their business idea.

In a blog post, Elizabeth Yin, co-founder of LaunchBit, writes, “I’ve been to startup events where it’s been all men and me. And, people will think I’m the caterer or the event organizer (even as I’m scarfing down the food and drinking all the beer). And, just to be clear, there’s nothing wrong with being a caterer or an event planner, but it reinforces to me that these stereotypes about what entrepreneurs look like definitely exist. It’s gotten better — with more and more women starting companies, this happens less and less to me (or maybe I just go to fewer startup events now). It will change – it’s a work in progress.”

Yin recommends female founders call people out when they encounter stereotypical thinking, while also being mentally prepared for outdated thinking at pitch sessions, conferences and other business events.

2. Building Confidence

As a female founder, you’ll face a lot of doubters. But the last place you want doubts to be coming from is yourself. Unfortunately, self-doubt and a lack of self-confidence can negatively affect your thinking — and ultimately keep you from reaching your full potential as a founder.

In an interview, Alison Gutterman, CEO and president of Jelmar, said that joining entrepreneur groups specifically for women went a long way in helping her “learn to build my confidence and overcome my negative self-talk. These groups have provided me mentors and peers to inspire me, hit me with reality checks on my capabilities and successes, and help me grow and learn from their outside perspectives and experiences.”

3. Connecting With Your Target Audience

Your first year in business isn’t going to be all hardships, though. Ashley Sarnowski, co-founder of Sunnie Hunnies, said, “Our first year in business was so exciting, because we got to see our audience and brand grow as we connected with like-minded customers who were interested in our products. I think a big part of that came from being true to ourselves and letting our personalities shine through on the website, in social media and elsewhere. Attaching our faces to the brand creates a personal touch and level of connection that we wouldn’t get otherwise.”

Studies have found that women are more empathetic than men, and this is something female founders can use to their advantage. When marketing your new product or service, it becomes easier to make an emotional appeal because you can better understand (and relate to) your audience’s pain points.

Helping your target audience feel understood should be a key part of your year one plans. A powerful emotional connection will result in loyal customers who stick with you through thick and thin.

4. Learning And Growing

If there’s one thing you can expect during your first year in business as a female founder, it’s a lot of learning and personal growth. You learn so much more through actually running your own business than you ever would after reading 100 articles about it.

Your first year is guaranteed to have constant ups and downs. You’ll undoubtedly face rejection and make mistakes. At the same time, you’ll find victories as you make sales and satisfy your customers.

The most important thing is to not give up when failures and setbacks come — and not to get overly confident when you succeed, either. Take a step back so you can look at the lessons that can be pulled from everything you experience during your first year in business. Identifying and applying these lessons in the future will put you on track for even greater success in the future.

Taking Year One In Stride

The first year in business for a female founder is full of challenges — but it also provides amazing opportunities to dig deep and come to understand what your strengths truly are. As you give your best effort and use the business acumen that you’ve already developed, you can lay a solid foundation for your new company, despite any obstacles that might try to throw you off course.

Business can be hard, but so are many other things that you’ve already conquered in your life. You can do this.



Source: https://www.forbes.com
​Image Credit: Getty