Monday, August 14, 2017

Baby Boomers and Millennials Should Unite

According to Taylor Brown for the Kauffman Entrepreneurs, "Baby boomers are micromanagers, work hard, do not understand technology, are stubborn and want to destroy the planet. Millennials are lazy, entitled, tech savvy, want to save the world and don't know how to communicate in person."

What's a business owner to do?
Although the generalizations of baby boomers and millennials vary, they do share one similar characteristic, they both share particular entrepreneurial characteristics. Millennials crave freedom and earning potential. Baby boomers have a desire to build something.
Why then don't baby boomers and millennials co-found together instead of focusing on their differences?

Read more ...

Monday, August 07, 2017

Support Women Entrepreneurs: Here's How

Supporting women entrepreneurs goes far beyond purchasing their goods and services, sharing expertise to help their businesses grow (e.g., through WPO chapter meetings), or attending the events that other women organize.

As Lisa Abeyta for Inc. Magazine goes on to say:
Those are actually the easy ways we can support women in business. The real challenge is continuing to support women when it requires that we hold them accountable for bad behavior or intercede when we see them making decisions that could damage their reputation or company.
If you care, read on ...

Monday, July 31, 2017

The Ultimate Secret to Success That Women Must Share

What do you get when you problem solve with a group of women entrepreneurs? Well I know just the organization that has the answer.  Keep reading.

Geri Stengel, contributor at Forbes, gives us a bird's eye view into what members of the Women Presidents’ Organization (WPO) found.
  • 77% of members do business with each other.
  • 67% of members’ businesses have grown since joining the group.
  • With growing businesses, 75% pay themselves over six figures annually.
“Entrepreneurs learn best from each other,” said Marsha Firestone, Ph.D., President of our WPO.  And that’s why you join a peer advisory group.

Learn more ...

Monday, July 24, 2017

Why You Need Food, Sleep and Exercise to Run a Successful Business

How many of you take care of yourself in a way that you are proud of?  Let's face it.  Most of us put our business first and everything else last, which is a recipe for disaster.

But whether it fits into your schedule or not, maintaining great health should come first, before our daily to-do’s, before our work. Why? As the article below says:
Because if we aren’t healthy, we can’t be successful, either—at home or at work.
Read more ...

Monday, July 17, 2017

How Do You Scale Your Culture?

In running a business, we all know its the little things that matter -- from acknowledging achievements to being unafraid of failure.  That's how you build an incredible culture.  It starts with values and works its way toward creating a framework for what's important when making decisions.

In the article below, scaling your culture is addressed along with how to be deliberate about it.

How to Scale Your Culture While Growing Your Company

Monday, July 10, 2017

Be Bold and Scale Big

Through the EY Entrepreneurial Winning Women™ program, the EY folks have gained a unique understanding of how to help women entrepreneurs succeed.  Its competition and executive leadership program identifies a select group of women entrepreneurs in the US and Canada whose businesses show real potential to scale — and then helps them do it.

In this article, they cover scaling big:  3 force multipliers for growth, which are contributing substantially to accelerated growth for women-led companies.

Monday, July 03, 2017

Are Small Business Tax Expenditures Operating as Congress Intended?

Research shows that policymakers and stakeholders have a blind spot when it comes to understanding how the tax code impacts women business owners and raises new questions about whether small business tax expenditures are operating as Congress intended.
This issue has a dramatic impact on the economy. The percentage of firms owned by women has soared from 4.6 percent in 1976—the first time the Census released a report on women’s business ownership—to 38 percent today. There are more than 11 million women-owned businesses with 9 million employees and they contribute $1.6 trillion to the economy.
As the article states, we need to know what in the tax code works for firms and what doesn’t.

Read more ...

Monday, June 19, 2017

The Scarcity Myth: Praise

In The Pitfalls of Praise, Rebecca Aced-Molina discusses how many managers assume praise will support a positive working environment, and help employees open up to criticism or feel good about themselves. But in fact, she says that praise perpetuates a scarcity myth—usually without us realizing it.

Read more ...

Monday, June 12, 2017

The Ultimate Small Business Idols

These sixteen (16) women redefined power by building their own businesses against all odds.  From tech giants to fashion designers to the 'Oprah Winfrey of China,' these powerful women are the ultimate small business idols.

Read more ...

Monday, June 05, 2017

Sweeping People Along by Great Leadership

According to James Bailey for HBR, great leadership is powerful, dominating, often overwhelming.  He goes on to say.
It can sweep people along through sheer animation. Great leadership excites, energizes, and stimulates. It’s a rousing call, shocking complacency and inertia into action. It’s one of the most potent pulls in human history, and as such accounts for much of humanity’s progress, as well as its suffering. 
Great leadership is not one-dimensional. As Bailey says, "It can be great and good, or one but not the other, or neither."

Read more ...

Monday, May 29, 2017

Never Lose Sight of Who the Customer Is

Bill Aulet, MIT Sloan Senior Lecturer and Managing Director of The Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship has said "you need to keep calm and trust the process," when it comes to entrepreneurship.  He goes on to say:
“It’s much more important to figure out who the customer is; figure out the process and what makes that into a business,” adding that “it’s even more important to have a great team.”
Listen to the interview here.

Monday, May 22, 2017

The Me, We, Do and Be Concept

According to Randall Bell, Ph.D., there are four cornerstones to all our great pursuits -- whether the pursuits be starting a business, managing others, or setting goal.  How do we get grounded despite being pulled in a million different directions?  It starts with cultivating the right habits.

Read more ...

Monday, May 15, 2017

Awakenings That People and Business Owners Have in Life

Clinical psychologist Dr. Henry Cloud has discovered certain “awakenings” that people have—in life and in business—that once they have them, they never go back to the old way of doing things.  And when that happens, they are never the same. In short, they get it.

Here's an example:
1. Return to what hasn’t worked.

Whether a job [or letting an employee go], or a broken relationship that was ended for a good reason, we should never go back to the same thing, expecting different results, without something being different.
Read more ... 

Monday, May 08, 2017

The Women Presidents' Organization Celebrates 20 Years of Magnificent Growth

©2017 Laurel J. Delaney.  All rights reserved.
The Women Presidents' Organization celebrated 20 years of magnificent growth at its annual Conference in Orlando, Florida, which focused on Entrepreneurial Excellence: The Next 20 Years.  The event was a huge success.

Learn more here.

Monday, May 01, 2017

The Broadsheet Features the Women Presidents' Organization

The ever popular The Broadsheet, Fortune’s daily newsletter on the world’s most powerful women, featured the Women Presidents' Organization.  Here's the clip:

Read the entire newsletter here.  Read the complete Fortune article here.

Monday, April 24, 2017

Roundtable of Women Business Owners and Entrepreneurs

President Trump, Vice President Pence and Ivanka Trump met at the end of March at a roundtable of business women and entrepreneurs in the West Wing of the White House.  The president, reading from prepared remarks, offered promising comments and compliments.  Here are a few of them.

Read the article here.

Monday, April 17, 2017

WPO 20th Annual Conference in Orlando, Florida 2017

The Women Presidents’ Organization (WPO) will hold its 2017 International Conference in Orlando, Florida from Thursday, May 4th to Saturday, May 6th 2017.

The conference encourages WPO members to share business strategies and experience with other successful women from all over the world, as well as learn from interactive seminars and speakers.

Additionally, it will provide potential members who qualify a unique opportunity to experience the impact the WPO has on women business owners professionally and personally.

To learn more and to register, visit here.  Conference schedule can be found here.  We look forward to seeing you there!

Monday, April 10, 2017

Do You Avoid Negotiating? No more

Does the prospect of negotiating with an employee, supplier, investor, or business partner make you a nervous wreck? Do you panic at the thought of sitting across a table from someone and driving a hard bargain or taking a tough stance?

You are not alone.  Yet:
A lack of negotiation skills and abilities essentially forces you to take what you can get. This leads to you putting more into a business relationship than you get back. In turn, you’re not able to produce or perform to your fullest potential.
Read more here.

Monday, April 03, 2017

How to Reduce and Treat Burnout

Preventing burnout requires being very deliberate about how we work but also why we work.  Yet as you run a successful business, it's hard to set limits or monitor actions.
I [Brad Stulberg] learned that burnout — a state of physical and emotional exhaustion often followed by apathy and illness — is ubiquitous across industries. Physicians, businesspeople, artists, teachers, and athletes all have high rates of burnout. As a matter of fact, most studies show that between 40 and 50 percent of people are experiencing burnout at any given time.
Here are some tips to prevent burnout, regardless of field or the type of business you run.

Read more ... here.