Ivy Sea Online: Women entrepreneurs are redefining business success

Most entrepreneurs share certain goals — to create an enterprise that's financially healthy and that allows them to exercise their independence and manifest their vision. Some entrepreneurial trailblazers, including many women, aim for a new definition of success that includes flexibility and lifestyle integration.

For many, identifying new ways to work is crucial, as compared to the traditional norms and conventional definitions of business success. After all, old norms and their limitations are exactly what prompt many women to become self-employed.

What are some of the unique trends - and challenges - of these business owners? In this article, we'll take a look at three: a business-vision that aligns with their values, financial wellness, and optimal balance between work and other life priorities.

Vision

For many conscious entrepreneurs, the traditional focus on maximized profit has left the door open for a host of ills, including ethics breaches, empty workaholism, a lack of meaning, and a deep and often destructive disconnect from values and the greater needs of the community and world.

"You reach a point where it's a necessity rather than a luxury to birth the vision that's solely yours," says Marty Fuller, founder of her Point Richmond-based business, Potentia, "Being self-employed, I'm manifesting my own dreams rather than someone else's."

For entrepreneurs like Fuller, a clear, heart-aligned vision becomes the most important aspect of the enterprise. From it, all other decisions get made, marketing is more authentic and effective, and challenges are more easily navigated.

Financial wellness

Many women find that self-employment and the ups and downs of the entrepreneurial journey bring long-held beliefs about money to the surface - in a hurry. Financial wellness starts with becoming aware of and updating our underlying beliefs about money, and expanding our definitions of prosperity and wealth. After all, you can't attract what you don't think is possible, even if your doubts lurk beneath the surface of your conscious awareness of them.

"You have to learn to let go of the fear of financial insecurity," says Paula Bonham, "paw-prietor" of Oakland-based Hot Diggity Dog Premium Pet Pampering.

"One of the most helpful things is to define success for yourself, including financial success," adds Maggie Oman Shannon, founder of San Francisco-based The New Story.

For women, who have often received mixed messages about money from society and perhaps from their families of origin, it's important to recognize and rewrite old scripts, and to find updated approaches, beliefs, goals, and resources that help to create a healthier, more positive relationship with money.

Financial wellness then becomes a tool to ensure that the entrepreneur's vision can manifest in a way that helps to enrich - in every way - all who are affected by their business.

Balance

The definition of "optimal balance" means different things to different people. For some business owners, it's being able to more easily blend business priorities with family and household responsibilities. For others, it's ensuring enough time for renewal and nurturing a good support-network, or allowing enough time for spiritual and wellness practices. For many women entrepreneurs, all of these things are priorities!

One trend that reflects the search for balance is the growth in home-based businesses, which numbered about 17-million in 2001. And as the economic power of women-owned and home-based small businesses grows, old stigmas once associated with home-based and/or micro-businesses are fading.

For Paula Bonham of Hot Diggity Dog, and Maggie Oman Shannon of The New Story, a home-based office allows the flexibility to integrate entrepreneurship and motherhood.

"I value the ability to care for my daughter during the days while maintaining my business with evening and Saturday office hours," says Oman Shannon. "My home office allows me the freedom of structuring my time and priorities, as well as discovering the breadth of what I can create through my own business."

Marty Fuller of Potentia prefers a home-based business for other reasons. "Other business environments can be very draining and full of negative energy," says Fuller. "While working out of a home-based office can be insulating, I'm being fed from my energy and not being distracted by other people, which is allowing me to birth my own business in alignment with my vision."

Size does matter when it comes to balance, vision ... and quality

A growing number of business owners strike a balance by purposely keeping their enterprises small and nimble rather than succumbing to the pressure to "bulk up" with more employees and locations.

More than a few enterpreneurs have found through experience that qualitative values may suffer when a business isn't conscious about the pros, cons, costs and potential gains of expansion. When it comes to uniqueness and a high degree of mastercraftsmanship quality, micro-enterprise size is an advantage.

Such micro-enterprises make up the vast majority of all business — over 75-percent — according to the National Association for the Self-Employed (NASE) and others, whereas the fast-growth "gazelles" that receive the most media coverage constitute only about four-percent of entrepreneurial enterprises.

Keeping the business small allows not just a greater balance and focus of energy and resources, but advantages such as greater creativity and higher degrees of specialization, uniqueness, and personalized service. Small enterprises have potential strengths that a large organization just can't keep up with.

A good support network is crucial

Staying conscious, passionate, and vision-aligned is challenging, but the challenge can be more easily navigated if you have a strong, solid support network of kindred advisors and colleagues.

"Enlisting the help of a very focused consultant and others who share my lifestyle and professional values has been instrumental," says Paula Bonham of Hot Diggity Dog. Bonham has tapped her advisors for vision clarification, when specific issues arise, and when she wants to more effectively flow with the perpetual transformation of entrepreneurship.

Many entrepreneurs strike an enjoyable and effective balance by collaborating with colleagues who share their general vision and values, and who can nicely complement one another.

"Collaborations with friends and colleagues is invaluable," agrees Marty Fuller. "Ultimately, it behooves us to be in that place where we attract and focus on that which strengthens us."

© 2006, Jamie S. Walters, Ivy Sea, Inc., Jamie S. Walters, Ivy Sea, Inc. This article appeared in the February edition of Bay Area Business Woman magazine, which reaches more than 50,000 readers in the six counties in and around the San Francisco Bay Area.

Find related articles in the links below. But why wait to act upon these and other "conscious, big-vision entrepreneur" tips? Connect with Ivy Sea for a telephone-consultation or customized "e-and-tel" workshop to identify and focus in on your vision, passion, strengths and opportunities. Find out more about your Ivy Sea "E-and-Tel" Consultation.