Raised Eyebrow Blog

As most of our friends and clients already know, Lauren and I published a book, The Boss of You, in the Spring of this year. The Boss of You is a guide for female entrepreneurs looking to start, grow and maintain a small business and it was truly a project of passion and love for Lauren and I. You see in addition to having a passion for the web and in particular how non-profits, activists and progressive business folks can use the web to make the world a better place, Lauren and I also have a long held passion for helping and collaborating with our fellow female entrepreneurs.

This week an article featuring us, and some other local female entrepreneurs came out in BC Business Magazine. Entitled What Women Want and written by Dorothy Bartoszewski, the piece touches on many topics that we covered in our book such as:

• The rate of growth of women in the business sector. Currently, in Canada, women are starting four out of every five new businesses.
• The different ways that women tend to measure success in their careers and business lives. Quoting from the article “a 2005 study that found that small-business owners look beyond mere profit or growth figures when assessing their business success. Other criteria they value include business excellence (such as positive customer relations), professional achievement (such as having control over their career) and personal satisfaction (such as balancing work/life demands and “giving back”). Women cared about these “other” criteria more than men did.”
• How we define sustainability as small business owners. Again quoting from the article “For these women, sustainability means paying themselves and their staff well; anything else, they say, isn’t sustainable over the long term. Bacon and Mears also choose to work with people they really enjoy; Raised Eyebrow’s clients are mostly non-profits and progressive businesses. Sustainability for Bacon and Mears also includes, in theory, avoiding the 24-7 workweeks typical of entrepreneurs – something the two women admit they didn’t always manage to achieve as they built their firm.”

In addition to all the positives the article also notes that the average female entrepreneur earns $30,000/year to the male $50,000. While some suggest this might have to do with women working less hours in order to be more flexible with their family lives (I’m really not sure who those women are, the ones I know who juggle work and family seem to work as much or more than their male counterparts), this trend disturbs me. We need to make sure that as women we are starting and running businesses that pay us competitive wages and salaries. While that’s more easily said than done, and while we are strong advocates for measuring success outside of an exclusively financial paradigm, I can’t stress enough the value of paying ourselves well.

The full article is well worth a read and includes the stories of some other local female entrepreneurs as well.

This entry was written by Emira Mears on Friday, November 7th, 2008 at 6:12 pm, is filed under Raised Eyebrow, and is tagged as . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.