25 Quotes to Honor Black History Month

In celebration of Black History Month, here are 25 quotes – from Rosa Parks to Harriet Tubman – that touch on success, humanity, gratitude and resilience.   These people paved the way toward equality for each of us and will forever be in our grateful hearts.

Congrats to These Top Women Entrepreneurs

Monica Smiley, publisher, and CEO of Enterprising Women magazine has announced the winners of the 2020 Enterprising Women of the Year Awards, an annual tribute to the world’s top women entrepreneurs. Honorees will be recognized at the 18th Annual Enterprising Women of the Year Awards Celebration & Conference, to be held from Sunday, March 29 to Tuesday, March 31 at the Wyndham Grand in Clearwater Beach, Florida.

The Enterprising Women of the Year Awards is widely considered one of the most prestigious recognition programs for women business owners. To win, nominees must demonstrate that they have fast-growth businesses, mentor or actively support other women and girls involved in entrepreneurship, and stand out as leaders in their communities. Many of the honorees also serve as leaders of the key organizations that support the growth of women’s entrepreneurship.

Congrats to all the award winners and finalists! We are happy to see so many WPO Chicago members and other Chicago women business owners come out winners!

Read more:

ENTERPRISING WOMEN MAGAZINE ANNOUNCES
2020 ENTERPRISING WOMEN OF THE YEAR AWARD WINNERS

How to Sniff Out Bad Behavior on Your Mobile Phone

A new Android app called Seudo is a potential gold mine of insights for those who are curious about what our mobile apps are doing behind our backs,

While it’s not the only app that uses a VPN to sniff out bad behavior—Guardian Firewall and Lockdown are other examples—Seudo goes a step further by trying to explain in detail what each app is doing. Using AI, the company identifies keywords or identifiers in the data it’s deciphered, then turns it into a description for users.

Good info to determine which of your apps are sharing way too much info and are suspect.

Whipping Up an Ad Blitz for Your Business At Super Bowl LIV

The Super Bowl has long been the event where large companies pull out all the stops. Smaller companies, however, are learning how to nab some of that limelight without paying for a TV ad.

From advertising around the event to working with host cities, the NFL, or even official vendors, here's how some founders are finding craftier and cheaper ways to make Super Bowl LIV pay.  This could be you!

Great Success in Business Starts with One Tiny Seed

There’s no “magic pill” that effortlessly launches you out of your cubicle confinement and into the free world of entrepreneurship. For some, the dream to be your own boss grows for a long time, even years, before it finally comes to fruition.

The truth is, great success in business grows from just one, tiny seed.

The folks at CreativeLive Blog asked some of their favorite women entrepreneurs to share how they got their start in business. Their answers revealed the deep motivators and personal qualities that drove them to make their big idea a reality.

Read more about how successful women entrepreneurs got started.

Innovations Don't Need to Be Flashy to Be Impactful

When people think about innovation, they often associate the word with products like Samsung’s Ballie—breakthrough technological marvels that are novel and impressive. These innovations excite the imagination, push boundaries, and set a new standard for what is possible.

However, innovation, according to Lincoln Wilcox for the Christensen Institute, doesn’t need to be flashy in order to make a big impact.

Learn more – there is a sweet solution.

How to Get and Stay in Front of the Pack

New research shows that market leadership is increasingly temporary. The challenge for companies no longer lies in just getting to the front of the pack — it’s staying there.

How do you get and stay in front of the pack?

Strategy has always been about defying averages — doing something exceptional that earns a company correspondingly exceptional rewards in the market. Today, that is still true, but the relentless churn and volatility in the business environment mean that simply outperforming the average is not enough.

The true test of leadership is continuing to outperform over time. Think you've got what it takes?  Read more.

Enterprising Women​ Magazine Announces 2020 Enterprising Women of the Year Award Winners

Monica Smiley, publisher and CEO of ​Enterprising Women​ magazine, has announced the winners of the 2020 Enterprising Women of the Year Awards, an annual tribute to the world’s top women entrepreneurs. Honorees will be recognized at the 18th Annual Enterprising Women of the Year Awards Celebration & Conference, to be held from Sunday, March 29 to Tuesday, March 31 at the Wyndham Grand in Clearwater Beach, Florida.

Background information:

The Enterprising Women of the Year Awards is widely considered one of the most prestigious recognition programs for women business owners. To win, nominees must demonstrate that they have fast-growth businesses, mentor or actively support other women and girls involved in entrepreneurship, and stand out as leaders in their communities. Many of the honorees also serve as leaders of the key organizations that support the growth of women’s entrepreneurship.

Read the full press release, here.  Visit Enterprising Women magazine.

From WPO Chicago Happy New Year!

©2019 Laurel J. Delaney.  All rights reserved.

Happy Holidays From WPO Chicago!

©2019 Laurel J. Delaney.  All rights reserved.

How to Support Women Entrepreneurs

There is much discussion and debate about how to support female entrepreneurs — and rightly so.

Currently, women-led businesses are less likely to survive, despite evidence that their startups are often highly successful. New analysis by Boston Consulting Group (BCG) shows that if women and men around the world participated equally as entrepreneurs, global GDP could ultimately rise by approximately 3% to 6%, boosting the global economy by $2.5 trillion to $5 trillion.

So how do we support women entrepreneurs?  Three areas:  improve access to credit (financial capital) or provide training to help women build new skills (human capital) and give them access to networks.

Read more about the trillion-dollar opportunity in supporting female entrepreneurs.

Standing Out From a Sea of Dudes

Nicole Kendrot turned a problem into a business opportunity. In her case, the problem was student loans–not just the amount of debt, but managing the payments. Her solution: to design a mobile app to track multiple loans and gamify the payback process so users can earn cash incentives. And like many startup founders before her, Kendrot came up against two more hurdles: time and money.

Here are a few ways women entrepreneurs, like Ms. Kendrot, say they’ve tackled the particular challenges they face in the startup world.

Take a Break and Then Get Back At It This Holiday Season

This past Black Friday was expected to once again be the largest shopping day of the season, followed by the last Saturday before Christmas.  And this year, there is a mad scramble between Thanksgiving and Christmas — but with six fewer days.  So that means customers will have less time to shop and retailers will have less time to woo them.

For busy business owners like you, it also means you better grab your break and then get back at it.  Besides, you deserve a break!

Read more about how this year we have less time to spend this holiday season.

How Women Business Owners Grow Their Businesses

Many women business owners never think their business will become a million dollar company.

“I never really thought I would be,” confessed Kahn, whose company [North Shore Children's Therapies] achieved that milestone in 2017. “I am more on a passion driven mission to helping kids and I don’t think that, for me, there is any sort of number to get to with that.”

Learn what other business owners said about running a million dollar company.   Oh, and an interesting fact:  the fastest growing businesses are run by women and people of color.

Product-based business? Service-based business? Try experience-based business.

Most of us know the difference between a product and a service-based business.  But what about an experience-based business?  What's that about?  Think of producing a product or providing a service but making it memorable.  Got it?

In a 1998 Harvard Business Review article, “Welcome to the Experience Economy,” authors B. Joseph Pine and James H. Gil­more identified experiences as an entirely distinct economic category. “An experience is not an amorphous construct; it is as real an offering as any service, good, or commodity,” they wrote.

According to a McKinsey study of U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis data, experience-related spending in recent years grew more than four times faster than spending on goods.

Find out why and what this means for your business.

Raise Your Game in 2020 By Reading Business Books!

©2019 Laurel J. Delaney.  All rights reserved.

At strategy+business, they "believe one way to stand a little higher than your peers is to spend some time mining insights from the large number of business books that are published each year. Whether they are distillations of theory or detailed playbooks, heavily documented historical investigations or futuristic manifestos, a stack of good books (or a queue of e-books on your reader) can provide a boost."  They go on to say, "Reading tests your priorities and exposes you to new ideas. And, because business books in particular tend to focus on best practices and phenomenal success stories, they spur us to think about how we can raise our game."

Here's to great reads and raising your game in 2020!

Best Advice for Overcoming Failure (Video)

Holly Whitaker, founder of online recovery school Tempest, and Kate Ryder, founder of health care company Maven, share their advice on what helped them succeed through failure, self-doubt, and countless business challenges.

Watch video.

Always Be Willing to Learn

Five women business owners talk about what inspired them to start their business, lessons they thought would have been beneficial at that time, and maintaining a healthy work-life balance.

A common theme among their answers and advice for up-and-coming entrepreneurs is to never stop learning.  Always be willing to learn.

We Just Aren't Cracking the Glass Ceiling

The good news is that there are more women in top-level positions at U.S. businesses than at any other point in history. But a study has found that many women face the biggest obstacle to reaching the top of the corporate ladder early in their careers, with fewer women than men getting the opportunity to take their first step into management.  [I believe that is why a lot of women start a business, to avoid being held back.]

There are still big problems getting there, and the biggest, according to a new report from McKinsey & Co. and Lean In, isn’t even breaking through the final “glass ceiling.”

Making Time Management Your Organization's Priority

To stop wasting a finite resource, companies should tackle time problems systematically rather than leave them to individuals.  That's according to Frankki Bevins, a consultant in McKinsey’s Washington, DC, office, and Aaron De Smet, a principal in the Houston office.

They go on to say:

While executives cannot easily combat the external forces at work, they can treat time as a precious and increasingly scarce resource and tackle the institutional barriers to managing it well. The starting point is to get clear on organizational priorities—and to approach the challenge of aligning them with the way executives spend their time as a systemic organizational problem, not merely a personal one.

Read the entire time management article here.