BREAKING THROUGH

portant,” says Tiffany Goldberg, director of entrepreneurship
training for the Hebrew Free Loan Society.
Most importantly, networks help entrepreneurs
land new business.
“In this business, that’s really how you get work,”
said Deborah Bradley, founder of Deborah Bradley Construction
& Management Services and president of the
Women Builders Council. “You can go on websites and
find public bid opportunities, but you have to make relationships
and somebody is going to have to put you
on their team.”
For women in a world where most people’s definition
of an entrepreneur is Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg,
female role models also are hugely important,
especially for low-income women who may have never
encountered another woman entrepreneur. When they
see people like themselves who have built successful
businesses, newbies gain confidence that they can do
the same and learn that there are many ways to grow
a business that don’t involve the shoot-for-the-stars
mentality that gets so much media coverage.
“Women really need to see more people like them
running a business and succeeding, being able to be a
role model and make them feel it’s possible,” says Yanki
Tshering, executive director of the Business Center for
New Americans.
Even for veteran entrepreneurs, role models can
make a difference. For Jennifer Blumin, founder of
event management firm the Skylight Group and a winner
of a 2014 Ernst & Young EY Entrepreneurial Winning
Women award, meeting role models helped her
think very differently about her business and what she
had to do to grow, she says.
But Blumin had to win an award before she was able
to connect with those role models. Nonprofits, networking
groups and programs like E&Y’s are working
hard to help women entrepreneurs. However, reaching
thousands of female founders, especially in low-income
and immigrant communities, and supplying them with
mentors and role models is a monumental task. Monique
Greenwood of Akwaaba Bed & Breakfast Inns
couldn’t find any help locally and went to a national
trade association for support. Lisa Gross, founder of
The League of Kitchens, used city-sponsored resources
but found they only touched the surface of what she
needed.
Janice Fredericks of Fabulous Freddy’s hair products
stores is a member of the Women Entrepreneurs
Network in Queens, but wishes she had known about it
when she started out five years ago. “If I had had more
of a circle of people who had done it before, if I had had
more support, I would have greater confidence going
into it,” she says. “I doubted myself a lot in the beginning.”
It took Ana Diaz, founder of Diaz Electric, two and
half years to find a mentor. “We kept searching for a
mentor, but we didn’t know how,” says Diaz. Now she
and her partner meet with him every month or two
and, among other things, he helps them set goals that
have resulted in new business.
What’s certain is that mentors—both women and
men—are an invaluable aide to budding entrepreneurs
and the more there are, the better. The New York City
chapter of the National Association of Women Business
Owners mentors five or six entrepreneurs a year,
says Executive Director Jane Wesman, but if she could
get financing, the first thing she would do is grow the
program.
“The most important thing that could be done is expand
the mentoring program we’ve created,” says Wesman.
“There’s no other way to get one-on-one mentoring
from an experienced woman entrepreneur.”
Some women, and especially low-income and immigrant
women, need training in basic business skills,
credit and finance
For women without a degree in finance or experience
in budgeting or cost management, a lack of financial
literacy can be a showstopper, not only limiting
growth but also making it difficult to manage even the
day-to-day business.
It’s not that women can’t “do numbers.” The fact
that women get nearly 40 percent of the MBA degrees
awarded every year in the United States and an increasing
number of scientific and technical degrees should
put that stereotype to rest. Still, high schools are only
starting to teach personal and business finance and
unless women take accounting or finance in college,
Breaking Through 33