Forbes
Entrepreneur Moms
(May 18, 1998) By Luisa Kroll
Walk into any bookstore. Go to the section marked “Business.” There you’ll find 101 Best Home-Based Business for Women, The Stay-At-Home Mom’s Guide to Making Money and How to Raise a Family and a Career Under One Roof: A Parent’s Guide to Home Business. Women aren’t just buying these books. They are talking the talk and walking the walk.
The Great American prosperity of the late 20th century owes much to the highly increased participation of women in the work force. These working women have poured into the general economy an immense flood of brainpower and energy that previously was locked in the home.
Not surprisingly, perhaps, a lot of this energy is being channeled into creating small businesses. Between 1987 and 1996 the number of women-owned firms increased by 78 percent nationwide, outpacing overall business growth by nearly 2 to 1. Many of these firms are tiny, but each contributes to the economy.
Fifteen years ago, in a cover story on entrepreneurial women, FORBES estimated that there were 350,000 women-owned business. There were at least 10 times that many in 1995, according to a report put out by the National Foundation for Women Business Owners.
Roughly three out of four home-based women business owners are college-educated. They tend to be in their 30s and 40s, are more likely than not to be married and have kids and work experience, according to IDC/Link, a market research firm.
Of course, many of theses businesses are short-lived, but not all: The average age of home-based, women-owned businesses is 6.1 years, according to the NFWBO. About a third are one-person businesses; the others probably employ about 10 million people, in addition to the owners.
“In a lot of ways, these businesses have become the new American Dream,” says Bernadette Grey, editor-in-chief of WORKING WOMEN magazine. “It puts women in the driver’s seat more than working for any corporation.”
Starting a business is a natural for women who want to work but need to stay home with kids. A small business run from home is a way of breaking down the barriers between work, home, and family. More than half of women business owners with previous private-sector experience cite the desire for more flexibility as the reason for starting a business. They insist nothing would attract them back to the corporate world. “I don’t miss the red-eye flights or putting on pantyhose or the stress of not being within driving distance of my 20-month-old son,” says Rene Shimada Siegel, a former Novell marketing manager who now runs a placement agency from her home.
When she was pregnant with her second child, Rene Siegel, simply walked away from the corporate world. “I gave so much to the company, I had nothing left for my family,” she says. But she didn’t want to stop working. She and a former colleague from Novell’s New Jersey division, Nancy Collins, also a stay-at-home mother, pooled their talent and $15,000 each to launch a placement agency for high-tech marketing and public relations consultants, HighTech Connect, in January 1997.
Siegel’s Pleasanton, Calif. home office has been wired for her new reality: She’s got three Macs, one PC, four ISDN phone lines, a cable modem and two handheld computers. Across the continent in New Jersey, Collins has a similar setup.
In one year the partners enrolled 300 consultants, all with at least five years of high-tech experience, and placed 50 of them in companies like Cisco, 3Com and Oracle. “These companies don’t care where we are or if we wear fuzzy flippers,” says Siegel. Last year the partners earned a 30% commission on $400,000 in sales without straying beyond earshot of their children.
Few things have done more for at-home entrepreneurs than the Internet. Stuck in bed for three months in the spring of 1996 due to complications with her pregnancy, Emanuela Bradley consoled herself by surfing the Internet. She stumbled upon the Work-At-Home Moms Web site and joined its E-mail networking list. She soon struck up an on-line relationship with fellow member Marla Jennings. A mother of three, Jennings designed Web pages from home; Bradley, a former customer service manager, has a folksy gift basket business.
They cooked up a concept. They would create an on-line shopping site selling goods from home-based businesses. They spent several months researching the market and finding vendors to “lease” space in the mail.
In September 1997 they launched At Home Shop (www.athomeshop.com). Today they have 30 vendors, 25 of which are home-based businesses run by women. To boost visibility, they will advertise on Microsoft’s renovated New York Sidewalk 3.0, scheduled to be unveiled late this summer.
Juggling business with childcare does not, of course, make for a placid life. Days can start at 5 a.m. and end late at night. Sure, you can take a break to take the kid to Boy Scouts or dance lessons, but the work is waiting to be done, late at night or early in the morning.
Children don’t always understand why they can’t interrupt mommy when she’s on the computer. But at least the kids know that mommy is there. Thus has the entrepreneurial mom emerged as a partial solution to the personal and societal problems that arise when mom’s need and desire to work conflict with child raising.
Karen Benton, a former nuclear chemist who grosses $100,000 a year as a sales rep for Longaberger Co. selling 24-to-200 dollar hand-woven baskets out of her home-based, women-run business phenomenon in this way: “Society has gone through several stages of blue collar and white collar,” she says. “Now, it’s the open collar.”
That’s a social class that Karl Marx never figured on. But then, he could never have conceived of a society as flexible as ours.
